so ive been on HF for about 8 months now running a IC-7300 and every time i get signal reports back on 40m SSB people are telling me i sound either too bassy or kind of muffled and i really cant figure out whats going wrong. i did the basic mic gain setup from the manual but i dont think thats the whole picture. someone at my club mentioned something about the TX bandwidth settings and the speech processor but honestly every time i touch that stuff it seems to get worse not better.

also not sure if it matters but im using the stock hm-219 mic that came with it, desk is pretty close to the radio on a wooden table. been watching some youtube stuff but they all seem to contradict each other on where to set the compression. anyone actually dialed in their 7300 for decent SSB audio or have a starting point that isnt just "experiment until it sounds good" because ive been doing that for weeks lol

yeah the stock mic on the 7300 is honestly not terrible but it has a pretty pronounced low end pickup and if you're close to it on a wooden surface you're probably getting a ton of desk resonance coupling in too. first thing id do is back the mic gain down until your ALC is barely moving on voice peaks, like just kissing the bottom of the ALC range, not slamming it. a lot of people run the gain too hot thinking more is better and all it does is create that muffled overdriven sound.

for the TX bandwidth i usually run around 2.4k on SSB, some guys go wider but on 40m with the kind of conditions we usually deal with the extra bandwidth just causes problems. and the speech processor - turn it off entirely first, get your baseline audio sounding clean, then if you want to add a little back in keep the level low, like 20-30% at most. the processor is for pileup situations when you need to punch through, its not supposed to be on all the time for ragchewing.

this might sound weird but have you tried just recording yourself through the monitor function and actually listening back? the 7300 has that built in and it was kind of a wake up call for me when i first started. i thought i sounded fine and then heard the playback and yeah, not great. turned out half my problem was just mic technique, i was talking directly into it instead of slightly off axis and it was popping on Ps and Bs constantly. little stuff like that makes a big difference and no setting in the radio fixes it if the mic input is already junk going in