so ive been getting reports for a while now that my audio on 20m SSB is either too bassy, too low, or just kind of muffled and guys have to ask me to repeat stuff constantly. im running an IC-7300 into a stock hand mic and i know i know everyone says get a better mic but i want to understand the actual problem before i throw money at it.

ive played with the mic gain and the compression settings and i feel like every time i touch something it gets worse in a different way. right now im sitting at mic gain around 50% and the ALC is just barely moving, like barely touching the ALC bar, which i thought was correct but apparently thats maybe too conservative? i also have the TX equalizer completely flat because i was afraid to mess with it.

also side note — does the way you hold the mic actually matter that much or is that more of a HF mobile thing. i feel dumb even asking that but someone at the club brought it up and now im self conscious about it every time i transmit

the ALC thing is your main issue probably. on the 7300 you actually want the ALC moving a bit more than just barely — like you want it nudging into the first third of the bar during normal speech peaks. if its barely moving your mic gain is too low and the radio is basically transmitting at low power with no punch. what happens is guys on the other end are hearing you but you sound thin and they're cranking their RF gain to hear you which adds noise.

on the TX EQ — dont leave it flat, that's leaving performance on the table. the stock hand mic that comes with icom gear has kind of a mediocre frequency response honestly. a lot of guys boost a little around 2-3kHz which is where speech intelligibility lives and cut below 200Hz to kill the boominess. you dont need to go crazy just a gentle curve. and yes holding the mic about an inch or two from your mouth matters, talking straight into the capsule versus at an angle makes an audible difference, not huge but its real.

yeah i went through almost exactly this same thing last year with my 7300. ended up spending like two weeks tweaking instead of just asking someone sooner. one thing nobody mentioned to me for a long time was the bass rolloff filter in the menu — theres a setting in the audio chain that can cut some of the low end before it even gets to the EQ stage and i had it off for forever. once i found that and turned it on the muddiness mostly went away. not saying thats definitely your problem but worth checking if you havent dug into those menus yet, theres a lot buried in there