so ive been running SSB for a few years now mostly on 40 and 20m and i keep seeing these threads where guys are spending hundreds on mic preamps and EQ plugins and whatnot and honestly i cant tell if any of it matters or if its just audiophile stuff bleeding into ham radio

my current setup is pretty basic — ic-7300 with the stock mic and i get decent signal reports most of the time but every now and then someone tells me im a bit muffled or that my audio sounds like im in a cave or whatever. ive fiddled with the TX bandwidth settings a little and the bass cut on the radio itself but not sure if im doing it right

so my actual question is, for normal SSB contacts and even some dx work, what settings or habits actually move the needle on audio quality? not looking to do any contesting or anything just want to be readable and not sound terrible. is the stock mic really the limiting factor or is it more about the radio settings?

the cave sound is almost always too much low end getting through. on the 7300 specifically go into the menu and look at the TX bass and treble settings — factory defaults are way too bassy for voice in my opinion. i cut the bass down a fair bit and boosted treble slightly and the difference was noticeable immediately. also the TX bandwidth, i run mine around 2.4k which keeps it tight enough to not splatter but still sounds decent.

the stock mic on that radio is honestly not that bad, people dump on it but ive heard plenty of guys with expensive desk mics that sound worse because they havent set the radio up right. mic positioning matters too — youre not broadcasting FM, you dont need to eat the mic but being too far away and your radio cranks the gain up and then everything gets noisy. i usually sit maybe 4-6 inches away and talk across it rather than directly into it, cuts down the plosives a bit.

speech processor is the other thing — most guys either dont use it at all or have it cranked way too high. a little compression helps with readability on a noisy band but if you can hear the pumping sound in your monitor it's too much.

yeah what he said about the low end is real, i had the same problem when i first got on ssb and someone on a net finally told me bluntly that i sounded like i was calling from underwater lol. took me a while to find the right menu on my radio but once i rolled off some of that bass it was way better apparently.

one thing i'll add is just monitor yourself when you can — plug headphones into the monitor jack if your rig has one and actually listen while you talk. sounds obvious but i went like a year without doing this and had no idea what i actually sounded like on air