so ive been on HF for about 8 months now running a Icom IC-7300 and every time i get a signal report the other station says my audio sounds kinda muffled or like im talking through a pillow. im not super close to the mic but i dont think thats the issue. using the stock hand mic that came with the radio which maybe is the problem? i have the compression set to like halfway up because i read that helps with SSB but now im second guessing everything.

my RF power is around 80-90 watts depending on band and ive been mostly on 40m and 20m in the evenings. nobody has said im unreadable but getting comments like "you sound a bit bassy" or "audio is a little muddy" on more than a few contacts and its starting to bug me. is this a mic thing, a settings thing, or am i just expecting too much from SSB?

the compression is almost certainly your issue. halfway up on the 7300 is way too much for most situations, that radio's built in compressor gets real aggressive and it'll make you sound boxy and muddy if you push it. try dropping it down to like 2-3 out of 10 and see if that changes anything. also the stock hand mic is fine but it does have a pretty prominent low end, so in the TX equalizer menu you can cut some of the bass frequencies around 100-200hz and boost a little in the midrange, somewhere around 1.5-2khz is where speech intelligibility lives on SSB. your voice will punch through better without sounding tinny. a lot of guys also just get a desk mic eventually because you get more consistent mouth to element distance which makes a huge difference in how your audio sounds from contact to contact.

yeah compression was the first thing i thought of reading this. i had the same problem when i started, turned mine way down and suddenly got way better reports. also worth checking if you're in the right mode -- like make sure you're actually in USB on 20m and not accidentally on LSB or something weird, i know that sounds dumb but i've seen it happen lol. and honestly for 40 and 20m in the evening you're dealing with some natural QRM and fading anyway so sometimes "muddy" is just conditions, not you