I just bought a hearing aid online and am hearing speech much better.
There were clues in your postings, but I was too gallant to say anything.
When was, harrumph, caff, caff, the last time you had your hearing checked?
All microphone systems make noise. The voice signal falling out of the bottom of a microphone is about a thousand times quieter than it needs to be. There will always be a sound booster in there and they all make noise, even if the microphone itself doesn’t. The juggling act is to make your voice louder than the noise, but not so loud that it overloads and causes distortion.
That’s what the recording engineer does.
In general, microphone systems built into a recorder do very well, the designers can do everything at once, but if you’re seriously soft-spoken, it could be hard to get up enough volume without boosting the noise up with it.
ACX Check tells you stuff.
The third reading, Noise Floor needs to be quieter than -60dB. To be safe, the performance should be about -65dB or -66dB (illustration). That leaves room for mistakes and performance variations. When I mastered #9 clip, it came in at -59.5dB. It’s louder than -60, so it would fail. Just announcing slightly louder would work, but isn’t wise. It’s too close.
That’s why I put the Noise Reduction step in there. 6dB less noise (the first of the three 6’s) allows you to clear each chapter comfortably even if you do make a mistake here and there. The second and third 6’s are settings so ACX Human Quality Control can’t tell you did anything. They hate sound processing.
The middle number in the illustration, RMS, is overall loudness and you have to hit it between a quiet value (-23dB) and a loud value( -18dB).
And yes, you can do that with the setting in the RMS Normalize tool.
You will always need to make adjustments to get from what you announced to what you submit. Nobody can read straight into audiobook standards. Audiobook Mastering is the fewest simple tools I could find to adjust what you recorded to what ACX wants.
When you Master a recording, see where the noise number is. If you can get it down to -62dB or -63dB, then that may be enough. Now that you can hear, turn the volume up and you should hear gentle rain in the trees sound. Shshshshshshsh. That’s nice, well behaved noise and it’s easy to ignore in the background of a reading.
Koz