Do we have a goal? Different goals have different production requirements.
The voice has a little “recording in the kitchen” sound. Was this a home office with bare walls? Even though the Yeti is a directional microphone, it’s not perfect and you will pick up reflections and echoes from the walls, ceiling, and floor if you have no carpet. I had a joke I could tell you the size of your recording space by analyzing the echoes. It’s permanent. There is no filter for that.
This is why some people outfit a closet for recording. I published a “Kitchen Table Sound Studio” for casual home recording.
https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/too-compressed-rejection/52825/22
Volume is good, if slightly low. Blue wave tips and peaks should reach up a bit more to around half-way (0.5). It’s OK as it is. The two extremes to avoid are having any part of the wave go all the way up—that’s permanent distortion, and having the waves too low. Then you struggle with background noise even more than you did.
Any reason you submitted in stereo—two blue waves? You can do that, but it doubles storage and transmission time for no good reason. The audiobook people recommend all voice work in mono—one wave. There are some odd exceptions. I used to submit stereo voice work to the video editors because I knew it was going to be folded into a stereo show. If I submitted in mono, I would be the odd duck. Still workable, just a bit odd. A hit to the professional reputation, etc, etc, etc.
You submitted in MP3. Any specific reason you did that? Never do production in MP3. Sometimes you have to deliver in MP3, but that’s up to the client. MP3 is something of a time bomb. MP3 gets its small, convenient files by carefully adding distortion. If the client needs to make their MP3 from your MP3, the distortion won’t hide any more. There was a forum poster who did a music review at home using download MP3s. He delivered to the station in MP3 and they couldn’t make the station podcast. Couldn’t do it. The music turned to trash.
Ask what the client wants or deliver multiple formats. In your studio, you should save raw performances and deliverable backups in WAV. You can make those into anything else. You can’t fix MP3, and you can’t make the distortion go away by folding a WAV in the middle. Once you make an MP3, you’re stuck.
Do you have a theater model? Anybody whose voice you like? I wish I had saved it, but there was a video of a woman in a very well padded home studio. She was the polished, professional “Please stay on the line. Your call is important to us” voice.
Your voice sounds like she’s carefully reading from a script instead of having an intimate, serious conversation with me. The pauses are a little off. Also avoid the bored instructor in front of a blackboard voice.
Koz