so this has been bugging me for a while now and i finally decided to ask. been running SSB on 40m mostly, sometimes 20m, and my audio reports have been all over the place. some guys say i sound great, other times people tell me i sound muffled or like im talking through a blanket. nothing has changed in my shack setup as far as i can tell, same mic, same rig, same everything.

im using an SM-8 desk mic into an IC-7300 and i know the 7300 has that built in eq and compression but honestly i havent touched any of that stuff since i got the radio. my TX bandwidth is probably whatever it defaulted to. my mic gain is around 60-65% which somebody told me was a reasonable starting point but maybe thats wrong? i do notice the ALC is kinda bouncing around a lot when i talk, not sure if thats related.

is there a standard way people set up their audio for SSB or is it really just personal preference and whatever the other station's radio does with it. feels like there should be some kind of baseline best practice for this stuff but i cant find anything consistent online

the ALC bouncing is almost certainly your problem or at least a big part of it. when ALC is working hard it means your mic gain is too hot and the radio is basically trying to protect itself by clamping down on the signal, and that clamping is exactly what causes the muffled squashed sound. back your mic gain off until the ALC barely moves on average speech, peaks are okay but the needle shouldn't be swinging wildly on every syllable.

also for the 7300 specifically there's a whole rabbit hole of menu settings for the TX audio. the TX bandwidth is worth checking, a lot of people accidentally have it set to something like 100-2900hz which is fine but narrower options like narrowing the low end too much can make you sound boxy. i run mine at about 300-2800 and it sits pretty well on most bands. the other thing worth doing is getting a friend on a nearby frequency to give you honest reports while you actually tweak things live, it's tedious but its really the only way to know for sure what you sound like on the other end

yeah the SM-8 is a pretty low output mic compared to some others so people sometimes crank the gain too high trying to compensate which is kinda counterproductive. had the same issue when i first got my desk mic. one thing that helped me a lot was just recording myself with something like the Monitor function if your radio has it, or even just a cheap SDR on a dummy load so you can actually hear what youre putting out. sounds obvious but most people never do it and then they're guessing based on second hand reports