so ive been on HF for about two years now mostly doing SSB on 40 and 20m and ive been kind of obsessed lately with trying to get my audio sounding decent. not like broadcast quality or anything, just not sounding like im talking through a wet sock. been reading a lot and some of it contradicts itself so figured id ask here.

right now im running an IC-7300 with the stock hand mic and honestly its fine i guess but when i listen back to recordings i made off my SDR it sounds a bit boxy and thin. ive messed with the TX bass and treble in the menu and the compression settings but i feel like im just turning knobs without really knowing what im doing.

the big thing im wondering is - does mic choice actually matter that much on SSB or is most of the work happening in the radio's DSP anyway? i keep seeing people swear by certain desk mics but i also see guys running DX with beat up hand mics and sounding totally fine. is there a sweet spot for compression where it helps vs where it starts sounding like garbage? feels like i keep pushing it too far and then backing off and never landing anywhere good.

also curious if anyone has strong opinions on the TX bandwidth settings. ive been running the default which i think is 2.4kHz on SSB and someone told me to narrow it down but that seems counterintuitive to me if youre trying to sound better

mic definitely matters but probably not as much as mic placement and the TX EQ settings inside the radio. the 7300 has pretty decent DSP and a lot of people run it with an aftermarket desk mic and just tweak the parametric EQ and it sounds really good. the hand mic that ships with it is kinda mediocre honestly, the element isnt bad but its voiced kind of mid-heavy which is fine for intelligibility but sounds thin on a recording.

on compression - yeah this is where people mess up constantly. the ALC meter is your friend here. you want the ALC just barely kicking in on peaks, not pegged over on every syllable. if you're running too much drive or too much compression the radio starts clipping internally and it sounds terrible AND it splashes on adjacent frequencies which is a whole other problem. i usually set mine so the ALC is just touching on the loudest peaks and leave it there.

the TX bandwidth thing - narrowing it doesnt make you sound better, it just makes your signal take up less spectrum. if anything for voice quality you want the full 2.4 or even a touch wider if conditions allow. narrowing it too much cuts the high frequencies and you lose consonant intelligibility. dont narrow it unless youre in a crowded band and trying to be a good neighbor basically.

honestly the biggest thing nobody talks about is just... how close your mouth is to the mic and whether youre actually talking across it or into it. i spent like six months tweaking settings before someone at a club meeting just watched me operate for five minutes and pointed out i was holding the hand mic about eight inches away and slightly to the side. moved it to like two or three inches and talked more directly across the element and the difference on the air was way more noticeable than any EQ tweak ive ever done.

also room acoustics if youre using a desk mic. hard surfaces behind you reflecting back into the mic can make things sound really roomy and weird. some guys put up a little bit of acoustic foam behind their operating position and it helps. probably overkill for most people but if youre chasing that clean sound its worth thinking about