so ive been running SSB on 40m mostly, sometimes 20m, and i keep getting reports that my audio sounds like im talking through a pillow or something. running an IC-7300 into a dipole, nothing fancy. i went through and set the TX bandwidth to around 2.4kHz which i thought was reasonable, mic gain is sitting around 50% and i have the compression off because somebody told me compression was bad. speech processor is off too.

the thing is i can hear myself in the monitor and it sounds fine to me, but every third or fourth contact somebody will mention my audio is muddy or hard to copy. one guy said i sound like im in a barrel which i thought was kinda funny but also frustrating. ive messed with the bass and treble on the radio a little bit but im not really sure what im doing there. is there some kind of baseline EQ setting people use for voice on SSB that actually works? or is this more of a mic placement thing

the barrel sound is almost always too much bass. SSB just doesnt carry low frequencies well and they end up sounding woofy and unclear on the receiving end even if it sounds great to you locally. on the 7300 i'd pull the bass down quite a bit, like -5 or -6 and bump the treble up a couple notches. voice intelligibility on HF really lives in that 1kHz to 3kHz range, the low end is mostly just mud over a noisy band.

also mic placement matters more than people think. if youre talking directly into the mic element you're gonna get a lot of plosives and proximity bass buildup. keep it a few inches off to the side of your mouth rather than right in front. and honestly the compression thing — i'd experiment with it rather than leaving it fully off. a little compression can actually help punch through QRM without sounding squashed, just dont go overboard with it.

yeah what he said about the bass, that fixed my audio when i was having the same issue last year. also worth checking if you have any ground loop stuff going on, i had this weird hum baked into my transmit audio for like two months before i figured out it was the laptop i had sitting next to the radio. wasnt obvious at all until someone recorded my signal and sent it back to me.