No that would be too much. You need something that will softly bend over the positive peaks and leave the negative ones alone.
I also think your formula could use some plain noise type static. Perhaps start with white noise with
some serious band-shaping.
If you look back in this thread, there was advice from both Steve and Koz on the Limiter and I now use Steve’s Limiter.
As for the compressor, I was before these two started teaching me but not anymore. The less we can do to our voices the better is the main lesson I’ve learnt from them. 
Cheers.
Perfectly true.
Ian’s Performance is very even to begin with.
Difficult passages can be readily fixed manually.
However, I have always a certain uneasiness when listening to the recordings.
It is some vague feeling that something is either missing or too much in the frequency spectrum. I miss some sparkles in the mids/highs (not the consonant parts) and it sounds sort of canny.
This might all be due to my ears or speaker system, I really can’t tell.
Yikes, you had me encouraged for a second there and then it all fell away. Is it something I’m doing physically?
Cheers.
No that would be too much. You need something that will softly bend over the positive peaks and leave the negative ones alone.
See: Class-A Modulator driven a little too hard? I think you’re much more likely to have audio compressors producing what one engineer at WRC-AM called “That Robust AM Sound.” I never met a multiple kilowatt AM transmitter that had that kind of non-linearities. I got a 5KW to pass square waves once — briefly.
I don’t know that we have a tool that does that, but I got really close with Effect > Leveller. That’s just a brute-force squasher (both peaks). That’s the effect I use after multiple strenuous application to produce Aircraft Pilot Voices.
Either gently produce the voice track and apply Leveller once @ “medium,” or get too close to the microphone which is how I produced AMRadio5.mp3.
That worked out way better than I thought it was going to. I so wanted to include the CBS News Sounder.
“CBS News, this is Grant Thorp in Washington. The White House today…”
I recorded that in the back yard after the sun went down. You can hear peepers in the original track. I think I scared the neighborhood cat.
I think the intercarrier whistle sells it, but Ian thinks it would be too distracting.
He’s no fun.
Koz
Robert, is this canny sound posdibly a defect of my De-Clicker or did you think it was there before Ian used it?
I am not now in a place where I can hear for myself.
What does he mean by canny noise? Back home that would mean someone was being wise / slick / sneaky (old Scottish word, heh). Does it mean I sound like I’m in a can? If so, I didn’t hear that but I haven’t had an answer yet on whether or not the latest sounds like there is too much static ambient noise again. Did anybody hear that?
Haha, well my author already told me when I first tried to make stronger American accents that he liked them but the shift from my natural narration voice might be too jarring to people. Since then I’ve been trying to just smooth out the clipped British notes and add in the obvious American sounds such as the longer A’s and the mis-pronunciation of U. 
Do you NOT think that a sudden whistle might be jarring if you’re nodding off to sleep or slowly driving home in traffic? heh.
Cheers.
My hat says engineer, not recording artist. Nobody would mistake those clips as anything but common, noisy AM Radio, and I can bore you stiff why they sound like that, but they are an element in your show.
The worst task in those clips was getting the popping static to sound right. All our tools are designed to make a show sound smooth and professional, not to make credible static. As before, the attack/decay feature is completely counterproductive in this instance and the adjustment doesn’t go to zero.
Also, the script isn’t completely clear how professional it should sound. They are broadcasting under extraordinary circumstances, but they used to have a radio show. On the one hand…but on the other hand…
Obviously, they won’t be going to CBS news at the bottom of the hour any time soon.
I’ve been trying to just smooth out the clipped British notes and add in the obvious American sounds
So now you need to sound like the American impression of a Brit speaking? A Brit approximating an American simulating a British accent?
I’m going to need a lie-down. Or a cuppa. Maybe both. Let me know if you want the recipe for that sound.
Koz
LOL
No, silly. I was concerned that it would be a hard sell for his fans to hear a Brit throughout considering the characters are clearly American. He loves my normal narrator voice and says that I certainly sound British but not with such a thick accent that an American audience would have an issue with it. He reminded me that he has fans in Britain, Australia, NZ so they’d all like it. He finally relented that I ought to make SOME attempt (beyond pitch, tone, etc.) to have the characters sound American. When I first tried he said he DID like the accent (though he may have just been being polite, heh) but it was SUCH a drastic change from my narrator voice that it could sound jarring. He did admit that he too isn’t a voice artist but since he IS the author, I tend to give some weight to his opinion.
So now I’m trying to use my normal British voice (which consists of 17 years in Wallasey near Liverpool, a few months in London, six years in Brighton and now almost 23 years over here) for all the narration and just smooth that out a little for the American characters. Rather than waTer, waDer (as Americans think it ought to be pronounced) things like that.
If I were true to Brent’s character (our protagonist) I’d have to master a college educate Tennessee accent and I’m definitely not there yet. So I’m using the usual pitch and tone with some smoothing of the clipped (read: correct) way we Brits speak.
Does that clear it up for you?
If not, have that tea and then get back to me. 
And yes please on the recipe.
Cheers.
As I said, I hear it in each sample file, your tool is perfectly innocent in this respect.
It might be due to the anti-resonator pads. they do a good job in general, but the layout is after all not minutely calculated and analysed.
Low frequencies, where the wave length is a multiple of the room length (e.g. 3.45 m = 100 Hz) are not as much damped as the higher frequencies which are caught by the pad structure. There are bigger obstacles needed, like a sofa for instance.
It might be helpful to see how white noise is modified after a pass through the whole recording system.
I’ve prepared a test file that you can play as input to the microphone (with some kind of playback system of course).
It includes:
I’ll be dashed if none of them shows the peaks/troughs I’m suspecting.
Of course, the playback adds some non-linearity to the result. The smaller, the less low frequencies will be radiated. That’s no problem for e.g. the impulse train.
Ian, I hope you’ll find the time to make the test. Try to go as near as possible to the 0 dB limit while recording in order to have the highest signal-to-noise ratio.
Thanks very much.
RJ
Of course, I’ll try that this evening.
Cheers.
I need to go back and remember how I made the popping noise. I have the project, but Audacity doesn’t remember the effects settings or UNDO.
Attached is the Project screen for AMRadio5. There’s a lot going on and I didn’t clean up after myself, so all the trials are still there.
I do remember the conditions for the voice (track 5).
Record the vocal track clean and apply Effect > Equalization: AM Radio > OK.
Then Normalize to -1.
That’s the basic AM presenter voice. I agree with flynwill that it needs to be a little dirtier. No AM station sounds like that, so try Effect > Leveller at Light or Medium. I got a similar pseudo-processed effect by leaning into the microphone while speaking (that’s my MacBook Pro internal microphone at night in the garden). The up side is no room ambience or echoes. But then there’s the cars and crickets.
Track 2 in that picture is the 5KHz sine wave whistle. Generate it and then Effect > Amplify to a new peak value of -35. Change that number to change the presence of the tone in the show — or don’t do it at all if you think it’s distracting.
Track 3 is the static. The simple narrative version is Generate > Noise: brown. Then Effect > Noise Gate which is then cranked to evil settings you would never use for quality audio. The occasional pops are the extreme peaks of the noise sound with everything else stripped off by Noise Gate. I think Effect > Amplify it so they were louder in the show. I need to get you the particulars about that. That, too can be tuned for theatrical effect.
Audacity will smash all the active tracks together when I export. The gray tracks will not be part of the show.
Koz
Thanks again, Koz.
It won’t be until tomorrow but I’m looking forward to a bit of experimenting.
Cheers, mate.
Greetings,
three Spectral Tests are uploading right now to OneDrive.
Unfortunately I had forgotten that I’ve started hearing a little bit of noise from either downstairs or next door since they are now using their air conditioner(s) so I hope that doesn’t invalidate the tests.
I was going to play it from my tablet at first but from what I read it wouldn’t have done justice to the sounds being played. In the end I went with holding my laptop up to the pop filter and playing / recording on there whilst I held my breath.
I hope it helps.
Cheers.
How are we measuring ACX Compliance? I see through searching that we seemed to have settled on WaveStats.
https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/wave-stats-plug-in/15515/1
I also see that WaveStats uses the “A” curve for RMS noise (normally pretty common). That’s at variance with ACX specs which are either C or X.
'Sup?
Koz
I always look at the normal RMS, The A-standard is fairly lower and would mean heavy compression must be applied to meet -18 to -23 dB.
Where have you read about the ACX measurement habitude?
Sorry if this whole thread is tl;dr for me-- but what ACX guideline document are we referring to? I have never bothered with A weighted rms values nor seen mention of them in requirements. I aim for -20 rms overall, 3dB of headroom, backgound noise below -60 rms, and proper spacing (I still follow the old rules of .5s at the start, 2.5s after chapter title, 3.5s at the end; new requirements are less specific). I have even neglected the headroom in my earlier efforts. ACX never complained except for some mistakes in my spacings.
So, has any one noticed the can-like sound I’ve been talking about?
No? I must be paranoid then…
I’ve been able to analyse Ian’s tests shortly.
What strikes me the most is the extreme presence of frequencies around 1 kHz and to a lesser degree the damped frequencies above.
I’ve radically corrected this in the following sample–quite revealing I dare to say…
I’ve tried to do it with the EQ-effect. Unfortunately, the preview doesn’t absolutely not play what it is supposed to play, i.e. the end result is not the same.
I’ve used the following line for the Nyquist Prompt instead:
(eq-band
(eq-band s 1000 -15 1.8)
2700 6 1)
Don’t tell me that the voice isn’t much clearer.
There is no one American accent, neither is there just one British. All of them are mere regionalisms and most are very unlike what Shakespeare would have said. I love the different musics in all of them.
But if by British we mean “RP” English, I find the most distinguishing vowel I tend to forget if I am careless imitating it, is the “o” of “not” which is rounded. So, Ian, remember to un-round it to sound like a Yank. (Except certain New Englanders, the real “Yankees” … details, details.)