Turns out I didn’t post the Kitchen Table Studio.
This is actually the wrong title, but it points to the kitchen table document.
Basic Business Practices: Produce a product or service of good quality and no more.
All you have to do is pass Audacity ACX-Check, Post a sample so the forum can check for distortion, sound, and theatrical errors, on-line ACX Audio Lab, and then the ACX eyes-on acceptance testing for the final book. Anything you do above that is a complete waste of time.
There are variations: You hate your natural voice and found filters, effects, and changes that you like. Be advised that means you have to keep track of all of those changes through all the chapters of the whole book.
There was a forum poster whose natural voice sounded like a broken microphone. She falls into the patch everything, all the time camp.
The phone and I applied gentle noise reduction because even though my mastered performance passed ACX-Check, it didn’t do it by much. From fuzzy memory, my test passed noise by -61dB. -60dB is the cutoff. Any change in post production or distribution might have caused it to fail. So I applied a correction.
Oddly, on-line ACX Audio Lab doesn’t check noise. I think that’s a serious shortcoming because noise kills a lot of readers.
Everybody Knows home microphone makers ship quiet products. If someone buys a microphone with strong volume, it’s a good bet they are going to produce overload distortion which sounds terrible. Send the microphone back.
Quiet but good sounding microphones make the performer think they are doing something wrong and keep the microphone. No contest.
The iPhone has gentle processing that prevents overload distortion and still delivers good volume. I intentionally tried to screw it up just as a test and I found it hard to do. That’s the kind of test I want to fail.
Koz