Don’t change Low Rolloff for Speech point by point. that way lies insanity. Instead, change the “Length” slider to the left. From the original recipe, the length slider should be about 5000 for mastering. The filter will be less strict with a lower number. And yes, you would one of the victims of that filter affecting men’s announcing voices. If you have been using that filter with a 7177 length as in that illustration, just returning it to the recommended 5000 or slightly less might be enough.
Failing to use a filter is not recommended because of digital microphone oddities.
Here’s how to find out.
Select a goodly chunk of Room Tone (see how handy Room Tone is?) > Analyze > Plot Spectrum.
You can grab one corner of the display and make it wider to reveal more information. This is what the bottom of mine looks like.
Those are the settings. It will tell you if you didn’t select enough Room Tone.
I found an “evil” clip to use as a sample.
The display is low pitch sound on the left, high on the right. Louder is up. It looks at the whole clip you selected at once. It can’t tell time. In a perfectly recorded analog microphone system, there would be little or no activity to the left of 20Hz. Digital systems, in contrast have no real world restrictions.
Here’s a bad one. Note that there’s activity at 2Hz (reading on the bottom). Not only is that not audible, it’s not even sound. That’s an earthquake.
This is Plot Spectrum after Low Rolloff.
It starts the affect at 100Hz and suppresses everything below that. That number was picked as a trade-off between damaging your voice and getting of rid as much rumble as possible. Everybody knows what the 100Hz filter does. It actually appears as a switch on the sides of some microphones.
Instead of Effect > Equalizer, you might try a custom setting of one of the other tools.
Try Effect > High Pass Filter, 40Hz, 24dB.
Listen to what it did. Write it down if you like it and use it as the first step instead of Low Rolloff.
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If you’re happy with the Chris process you should stick with it. Limiter directly affects passing ACX Peak. If you pass that now, you don’t need Limiter.
You should try and avoid mixing and matching suites. Mastering 4 is a series of tools that produce predictable affects and then clean up after each other. If you use them out of order…
I obsessively clean the spoken audio
Yup. That’s a problem. It’s not a good idea to crank up your headset volume to “dive for noise.” You will be doing that one book for the rest of your life.
There is a technique to submit a test to ACX
Koz