so ive been on SSB for about a year now and honestly my audio has always sounded kind of off but ive just been ignoring it. finally had a guy on 20m tell me my signal sounded like i was talking through a tin can and that was enough to make me actually look into it

my rig is a ts-590sg and im running a heil headset, the pr-40 element one. i know the mic gain and the speech processor are both things i should probably be paying attention to but every time i touch the processor i either sound completely squashed or not much different at all. right now i have the mic gain around 50 and the processor on but turned down pretty low

also im not sure if im supposed to be in USB or LSB for 20m - i know theres a convention but ive seen guys operating both on that band which confused me. and do i need to EQ anything or is the stock audio on the 590 decent enough to just leave alone

honestly just looking for the basics of what experienced SSB ops actually do to get decent sounding audio, not trying to build a broadcast studio just want to not sound like garbage on the air

20m is USB, anything above 10mhz is upper sideband by convention. if you saw guys on LSB on 20 they were probably either doing something weird or using some digital mode setup that shifted things around. just stay USB on 20, 17, 15, 12, 10.

for the audio stuff on the 590 - the mic gain is one of those things you really need to set by watching the ALC meter not just picking a number. you want the ALC just barely flickering on voice peaks, if its pinned youre way too hot and youll sound distorted and wide. a lot of guys run mic gain too high because it feels like more power but it isnt, youre just making a mess of your signal

the speech processor on kenwoods is pretty aggressive when you turn it up, i usually keep mine low or off for casual contacts and only bump it up when the band is rough and i need to punch through. for a heil element you might also want to check if the 590 menu has the mic EQ settings, there are some presets in there and the heil setting actually sounds pretty reasonable as a starting point. try that before messing with too much else

yeah what he said about the ALC is the big one, took me forever to figure that out when i started on HF. also one thing nobody told me for a while - make sure youre actually speaking across the mic not directly into it if you have a boom mic, reduces the plosives and p-pops a lot. sounds dumb but it made a noticeable difference for me

honestly getting an audio clip of yourself from a friend on the band or even just recording your own transmitted audio is the fastest way to hear what the problem actually is. some guys use SDRs to monitor their own signal which is kind of overkill but it works