so ive been on SSB for about two years now mostly on 40 and 20 meters and i keep getting reports that my audio sounds kinda muddy or boxy, one guy last week said it sounded like i was talking through a tin can which honestly stung a bit. im running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 which by most accounts should be a decent combo. i have the microphone gain set around 50% and im trying to keep the ALC moving but not pegged.

im wondering if its an EQ thing or maybe the mic position, i tend to hold it pretty close because im in a noisy apartment and i figured closer meant less background noise getting picked up. could that be causing some kind of proximity effect issue? ive read about people rolling off the low end to clean things up but i honestly dont know where to start on the 7300s built in parametric EQ.

any thoughts appreciated, been lurking here for a while and figured id finally just ask

proximity effect is almost certainly a big part of your problem. dynamic mics like the PR-40 will get really boomy and muddy when you work them too close, you want to be maybe 6 to 8 inches away and speaking across it slightly rather than dead on into the capsule. that alone might clean things up quite a bit.

on the 7300 EQ, what most people do is cut somewhere in the 200-300hz range to reduce that chest/box sound, and then add a slight bump around 2-3khz for presence. the passband on SSB is already pretty narrow so you dont want to go crazy with the low end or youre just wasting transmit power on frequencies nobody can hear anyway. also double check that your tx bandwidth isnt set too narrow, the 7300 lets you adjust the low and high cut filters and sometimes they get moved by accident. if your high cut is sitting at like 2400hz youre chopping off a lot of intelligibility.

also keep the ALC barely moving, like just kissing the meter. if its bouncing around a lot youre overdriving something upstream of the final stage and thats its own kind of distortion.

yeah what he said about proximity effect, that got me too when i first switched from a desktop mic to a boom mounted one. completely changed how i was positioning it and made a huge difference.

one other thing i'll throw out there -- have you monitored yourself with the receiver? like actually tune to your own frequency on a separate radio or even a cheap SDR dongle and listen to what youre putting out. i spent months guessing based on other peoples reports before i actually just set up my old RTL-SDR on the other side of the room and listened. turns out i had some weird processing artifact i never would have tracked down otherwise. kind of a pain to set up but worth it once.