so ive been running SSB on 40m and 20m for a while now and i keep getting reports that my audio sounds kind of muffled or like im talking through a pillow. its not terrible, people can understand me fine, but ive heard other stations that sound really crisp and present and mine just doesnt compare. im running an IC-7300 with the stock mic, just the hand mic that came in the box, and i havent really touched the audio settings much because honestly the menus kind of intimidate me and i didnt want to break something that was at least partly working.

i know the 7300 has parametric EQ built in and also the TX monitor thing where you can hear yourself, but when i tried the monitor it sounded fine to me so i dont really know what to judge against. a friend said i should look at my mic gain and compression settings but i dont really know where to start. is there some kind of baseline people use for voice audio on SSB or is it just totally personal preference and trial and error

the stock hand mic on the 7300 is honestly just okay, its not terrible but its voiced kind of flat and doesnt have the presence boost you want for SSB where everything above like 2.5k gets cut off anyway. first thing id do is back off the mic gain until your ALC is barely moving on voice peaks, like occasional flickers not pegged. a lot of people run too much mic gain and then the ALC is working constantly which just smashes everything together and sounds muddy on the other end.

for the TX eq i use a slight cut around 200-300hz to get rid of the boominess and a gentle boost somewhere around 1.5-2khz for presence, nothing dramatic. the speech processor on the 7300 is actually pretty decent but run it gentle, compression level around 3-4 not cranked up. and yeah use the TX monitor on headphones not speakers because you need to hear what youre actually putting out. once i dialed mine in people started commenting it sounded pretty good so its worth the time messing around in the menus

yeah same thing happened to me when i first got on SSB, turns out i had the mic too close to my mouth and was getting a ton of low end plosives on p and b sounds which just sounds awful. try keeping it like 2-3 inches away and talking slightly across it rather than directly into it. also worth checking if you have any RF getting back into the mic cable, i had a grounding issue once that was adding this weird hum that i couldnt hear on the monitor but showed up on recordings someone made of my signal. had someone on the other end record a bit of my audio on their phone held up to the speaker and that was way more useful than anything else honestly