so ive been on SSB for about a year now mostly on 40m and 20m and honestly the audio quality thing has been bugging me for a while. people keep telling me i sound muffled or like im talking through a tin can and i cant figure out if its my mic gain, the compression, or just the stock mic that came with the radio (its an IC-7300 for reference). i've messed with the TX bandwidth settings a bit and tried setting the high cut filter around 2700hz and low cut somewhere around 100hz but i honestly dont fully understand what im doing there

like does anyone have a go-to set of mic gain and compression settings they actually use? i know every voice is different and every shack is different but there has to be some starting point that isnt just wild guessing. ive read a bunch of conflicting stuff online where some guy says max compression is the way to go for DX and then somebody else says any compression at all is destroying your audio. also my ALC is always pinning which i think is bad? or maybe not? idk someone told me to watch the ALC bar but didnt explain what i was actually supposed to be watching for

any tips appreciated. not looking to buy a $400 heil mic right now unless thats genuinely the only answer

the ALC thing is actually the key piece you're missing i think. on the 7300 specifically you want to see the ALC just barely touching the top of the scale on voice peaks, not sitting there pinned the whole time you're talking. if its pegged solid that usually means your mic gain is cranked too high and you're probably generating a lot of splatter which is why people say you sound rough.

for a starting point i'd back the mic gain down until ALC is just kissing the limit on peaks then add compression slowly. the built in comp on the 7300 is actually pretty decent, i run mine around 5-6 and it helps punch through on marginal conditions without completely wrecking the audio. the TX bandwidth you set sounds reasonable, some guys go a little wider like up to 2800 on the high end but 2700 is fine for most contacts. the stock mic on that radio is honestly not bad once you get the levels right, its not a heil but its usable. just make sure you're holding it correctly too, those electret mics are really sensitive to how far away you are from the element

yeah compression is one of those things where everyone has a really strong opinion and half the opinions contradict each other lol. my take after doing a lot of SSB contesting is that a little goes a long way and the people who say max compression is great are usually thinking about it from a signal strength standpoint not an audio quality standpoint. sure you average power goes up but you sound like a robot and good operators will have a harder time copying you when conditions get sketchy because everything is the same volume.

one thing nobody ever mentions is the speech processor on vs off when youre just having a ragchew on a quiet band. i turn mine off completely in those situations because theres no point and it keeps the audio sounding more natural. save the compression for when you actually need to fight through QRM or marginal propagation. also room acoustics matter more than people realize, if your shack is super reflective and echoey that comes through on SSB a lot more than it does on FM