I resumed work on the project, thankful we had managed to work all the issues out, and resolved to never let anything like this come between us ever again!
Thus neatly side-stepping a fix for the actual problem—bad studio acoustics.
Echoes are your own voice arriving at the microphone multiple times: Once direct and then multiple times bounced from the walls, ceiling, and floor. So the job is removing your voice from itself. That’s why nobody is racing to the rescue. This is not trivial.
You might well say the echoes are always lower volume than the voice. True, and that’s how Noise Gates work.
Anything lower volume than what the plugin perceives is normal speech is suppressed. That seems like a gift from the angels, but it comes with ancillary problems. You have to announce perfectly. No more expressive or theatrical volume changes. One volume change in the wrong place and your voice—or parts of your voice—will vanish.
Also, they can damage normal speech by accident. A wrong setting can chop off leading and trailing word sounds.
I can provide several instances where someone produced perfect visuals and destroyed the whole thing by sounding like they’re announcing in a bathroom.
Q1, Q2
You’re juggling distortions. Q2 does have fewer echoes and that would be unconditionally recommended, but it has Essing. Your SS sounds could cut wood and scare the cat. I use Trebor’s DeSibilator rather than the more common DeEssers.
Select your performance and find the RMS (loudness) value. Analyze > Contrast > Measure Selection (write it down) > Close.
Plug that into the DeSibilator “Threshold” setting. > OK.
Koz