so ive been on HF for about a year now mostly doing digital but lately ive been getting into SSB and honestly the audio coming out of my rig sounds pretty rough. people keep giving me reports like 'youre readable but sounds a bit muffled' or 'turn up the highs a bit' and i dont really know where to start. im running an IC-7300 into a heil PR-40 which everyone told me was a good combo so im confused why the audio isnt great.

ive got the mic gain sitting at about 50% and the compression is off because someone told me not to use compression until i get the basics right. ALC is barely moving, like maybe one or two bars on peaks. is that normal? i feel like maybe i have the wrong mic element setting or something but i cant figure out what profile to use in the radio. any pointers would be appreciated, been digging through the manual for like two hours and its not clicking for me.

the PR-40 is a large diaphragm dynamic and its got a pretty pronounced low-mid bump which can make you sound muddy if you're talking too close to it. try backing off to maybe 6-8 inches and enable the bass rolloff on the mic itself if you havent already. on the 7300 side go into the menu and look at the TX tone settings, theres a bass and treble adjustment in there - most people bump the treble up a little and cut the bass just slightly for SSB. also the mic gain at 50% might actually be too low depending on how loud you talk, you want the ALC to kiss the top of the scale on voice peaks but not pin it. get a friend on the air with you or use a websdr to monitor your own signal, that'll tell you way more than any signal report from someone being polite.

yeah i had the same issue when i started, took me forever to realize the 7300 has a passband filter for TX that defaults to something pretty narrow. check your TX bandwidth settings, mine was set to like 100-2800hz which is pretty telephone-sounding. opening it up to 100-3000 or even a bit wider made a noticeable difference. also dont completely ignore compression - a little bit of it, like 2-4dB, actually helps readability without making you sound squashed. people say avoid it but i think they mean dont crank it to 10 and call it done.