so ive been messing around with my audio chain for a while now trying to get a decent SSB signal and honestly it's hard to tell sometimes what's actually helping vs what im just convincing myself sounds better. running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 with the icom adapter and the reports i get are decent but not great — people say im a little bassy and sometimes muddy on peaks.

ive tried tweaking the TX equalizer in the radio and that helped some, cut a bit around 200hz and it seemed to clean things up but then someone on 14.225 told me i sounded thin. so i bumped it back and now im back to muddy. the mic gain is set pretty conservatively, ALC is barely moving, compression is off because i read a dozen posts saying not to use it but now im reading stuff saying a little compression is fine and actually helps intelligibility on a busy band.

at what point does any of this actually matter on a noisy HF band vs just having a decent signal level and good mic placement? genuinely asking because ive spent way too many evenings on this and im not sure im hearing real differences anymore

yeah this rabbit hole is deep and i fell into it hard when i first got my 7300 too. honest answer is mic placement makes a bigger difference than most people want to admit — like embarrassingly so. if you're too close to the PR-40 you're going to get proximity effect piling up the bass and no amount of EQ fixes that cleanly, you're just compensating for a problem you created. try backing off maybe 6-8 inches and speaking across the mic rather than directly into it and see if that changes your baseline before you touch another setting.

on the compression thing, the guys who say never use it are usually thinking about the bad old days with hardware compressors cranked way up. a little speech processing on the 7300, maybe 2-4 on that internal processer, genuinely does help cut through when the band is rough. i keep mine at 3 and my received audio reports got noticeably better. you dont need to slam it. also worth asking a buddy to actually record your signal with SDR# or something on the other end so you can hear what you actually sound like vs relying on signal reports which are honestly pretty useless for audio quality feedback

honestly i went through the exact same thing and what finally made me stop tweaking was getting a websdr up on a second screen while i was transmitting. hearing yourself is a completely different thing than guessing from reports. you'll figure out in about 30 seconds if your audio is bassy or thin or whatever. changed my whole approach. also the PR-40 is kind of a dark mic to begin with so yeah a little cut in the low mids is probably not wrong