so ive been running SSB on 40m for a few months now and keep getting reports that my audio is kinda muddy or muffled, one guy told me i sounded like i was talking through a pillow which, ouch. im running an IC-7300 into a desk mic, the SM-30 that came with a bundle deal i got. i have the bass turned up a bit because i thought that would help with presence but maybe thats the issue? the mic gain is sitting around 50% and the RF power is at 75w.

ive messed with the bass and treble settings in the menu but honestly the menu on that radio is kind of a rabbit hole and im not totally sure what im actually changing vs what matters. someone in a net mentioned something about a speech processor but i told me to be careful with it. just want to get to a point where people dont cringe when i key up lol

yeah the SM-30 is a decent mic but the default EQ settings on the 7300 out of the box are not great for SSB voice, at least in my experience. first thing id do is roll off the bass - like seriously cut it, SSB doesnt need anything below maybe 300hz and all that low end just turns into mud on the receiving end because the filters are trying to process it. boost a little around 2-3khz instead, thats where voice clarity and intelligibility lives.

the speech processor (the PROC button on the 7300) can actually be really useful but people abuse it. if you crank it up too high you start getting that over-compressed distorted sound that some guys seem to think makes them louder but actually just makes them harder to copy. i run mine at maybe 3-4 on the drive and it helps punch through on marginal conditions without sounding terrible. also make sure your ALC is behaving - watch that meter while you talk, if its pegging hard you're probably overdriving the mic input and thats gonna muck up your audio before it even gets to the TX chain.

one thing nobody told me for a long time was to actually listen to yourself on a second receiver or ask a local to record you and play it back. i spent like a year thinking my audio was fine because people were just being polite about it. when i finally heard a recording i was pretty embarrassed, lots of low end rumble and i was talking way too close to the mic which was causing all kinds of plosive issues on the p and b sounds.

keeping the mic a bit further back than feels natural and talking slightly across it rather than directly into it made a huge difference. also worth checking if you have the TX bandwidth set too narrow in the menu - theres a setting on the 7300 where you can adjust the TX passband and if someone cranked it narrow for some reason your highs will be getting chopped off before they even transmit