so ive been on SSB for maybe 8 months now and i keep getting reports that my audio sounds "processed" or sometimes people say its kinda bassy and unclear. im running a ts-590sg into a heil pr-40 which i thought was supposed to be a good combo but clearly something isnt right. the mic gain is set around 50% and i have the speech processor off because someone told me it causes more problems than it solves for newer operators.

ive tried adjusting the equalizer in the radio a little but honestly i dont really know what im doing with that. is there a standard starting point people use for mic eq on that radio or do i need to be doing something on the computer side too. also how do i even know what my transmitted audio actually sounds like without asking someone every time — i feel like thats getting annoying for the guys on my local net

The PR-40 is a great mic but it has a really wide frequency response and the 590 can get overwhelmed if the mic gain is wrong. 50% might actually be too high depending on how close you're talking into it — try pulling it back to like 30-35 and speaking directly into it about 2-3 inches away, not off-axis. A lot of people make the mistake of treating dynamic mics like condenser mics and just kind of talking in the general direction of them which kills the presence.

For the EQ on the 590 there's a TX bandwidth setting you can narrow down, something like 2.4 or even 2.0 kHz can clean things up a lot for voice without losing too much intelligibility. The default TX filter settings on that radio are pretty wide and on a noisy band that extra low end just becomes mud. Also check your ALC — if its pinning constantly you're overdriving the PA stage and that's going to make everything sound harsh and distorted even if the mic itself is fine. You want the ALC just barely touching on peaks.

As for monitoring your own audio, the easiest thing is to set up a second receiver nearby or use the radio's monitor function if it has one. The 590 does have a sidetone/monitor mode I believe, check the menu. Way easier than bugging the net guys every week.

yeah speech processor being off is probably fine for now tbh, i ran mine off for about a year when i started and it really helped me learn what clean audio sounds like before i started messing with compression. once you add processing on top of bad fundamentals you just get a consistently bad sound instead of a variable bad sound lol

one thing that helped me a lot was actually recording myself — just plug a cheap usb audio interface into the radio acc port and record a few seconds of yourself talking, then play it back. its kind of embarrassing at first but you hear exactly what other people hear. changed everything for me when i realized i was way too close to the mic and getting a ton of proximity effect buildup in the lows