so ive been on HF for about two years now and SSB is still kind of a mystery to me in terms of getting decent audio. like i can make contacts fine but people keep telling me i sound either too bassy or just kind of mushy, one guy last week said i sounded like i was talking through a cardboard box which was not great to hear

im running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 which supposedly is a good combo, and ive read a bunch about setting the mic gain and the ALC but every time i think i have it dialed in someone tells me something different. i set the ALC to barely moving like most guides say but then people say im low audio, i bump it up and then apparently im distorting. its like theres no middle ground

also not sure if my bandwidth settings are right for SSB - im on 2.4kHz which seemed standard but i've seen guys running narrower and some guys running wider like 2.8 or even 3.0. does that actually matter that much for how you sound on the other end or is it more about the mic and processing side of things

honestly open to any tips here because im kind of at a loss

the ALC thing trips up a lot of people with the 7300 specifically. the meter on that radio is kind of misleading because it responds fast and you end up chasing it. what you actually want is to set your mic gain so that on normal speech peaks the ALC is just barely kissing the first bar or two, not sitting there pegged or anything. if its riding the ALC meter consistently youre almost certainly overdriving the TX DSP and thats where that mushy distorted sound comes from

the PR-40 is a great mic but its also a very full-range mic which means it picks up all the low end of your voice that SSB really doesnt need and can actually work against you. a lot of guys running that mic will cut some of the low frequencies using the bass rolloff on the radio or just in the mic settings. on the 7300 dig into the TX equalizer and shelf off anything below maybe 200Hz, bring up the presence a little around 2-3kHz and see if that doesnt clean things up. makes a huge difference honestly and thats probably why you sound bassy to people

on the bandwidth question - 2.4 is totally fine for normal contacts. wider just means more noise gets in on their end. i wouldnt overthink that part

yeah i had basically the same problem for forever and it turned out my mic was just too close to my mouth and i was eating it basically. moved it back like 6 inches and suddenly reports got way better, no processing changes or anything. sometimes its the dumb simple stuff

also worth getting a friend to do a recorded over-the-air check with you if you can, like actually record both sides with something like SDR# or even just a cheap SDR dongle on another receiver so you can hear what youre actually transmitting. you cant really trust reports from random contacts that much because half the time people just say youre fine to be polite