so ive been running SSB on 40m mostly and a few guys on the band have told me my audio sounds muddy or kind of boomy and i honestly dont know where to start with fixing it. im running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 which i figured would just sound good out of the box but apparently not.

i have the TX bandwidth set to around 2.4kHz which i thought was fine for voice, and the mic gain is sitting at about 50% but the ALC is kinda bouncing around a lot when i talk — like it dips pretty hard on my voice peaks. not sure if thats the problem or if its the eq settings in the radio or what. ive messed with the bass and treble in the menu but nothing really seemed to help much. anyone run this combo and know what settings actually work?

the ALC bouncing hard is almost definitely your problem — that usually means youre overdriving the mic preamp and the radio is trying to compensate. with the PR-40 on the 7300 i actually run the mic gain a lot lower than you'd think, like around 30-35% and let the speech processor do some of the work if needed. the PR-40 is a hot mic to begin with so you dont need to push the gain much.

also on the bass thing — that mic has a proximity effect that is pretty significant, so if youre talking close to it youre gonna get a ton of low end buildup. try pulling back a few inches and then cut some of the bass in the radio's EQ, like below 200Hz or so. on SSB all that low frequency stuff is just mud anyway, it doesnt help readability at all and just eats up your power on frequencies nobody can really hear clearly over a radio link. the sweet spot for SSB intelligibility is more like 400Hz to maybe 2.8kHz. once i made those adjustments my audio reports went from mediocre to pretty consistently good.

yeah what he said about the ALC is spot on. i had the same issue when i first got my 7300 and spent like two weeks thinking it was a hardware problem before someone told me to just back off the mic gain. feels counterintuitive but the radio really doesnt need much input to drive it properly.

one other thing worth trying if you havent already — get someone to give you an honest signal report while you monitor yourself on a second receiver or even a websdr. hearing yourself is kind of eye opening. i caught that i was way too close to the mic and also my room has a lot of bass resonance which was making everything worse. small stuff but it adds up on SSB.