Audacity Forum

When I made the original recording, I was using (I can't remember the preamp, but it was USB) and kept the input gains low, the input volume low on Audacity and then all I did was use normalize and leveller after recording to get the right level of volume throughout the recording using the default settings for the normalize and leveller.

I would not be using Leveler. Leveler is a brute force peak limiter and intentionally creates distortion. We are considering dropping leveler as the only use any of us have found for it is to create Air Traffic Controller voices.

"SoCal Approach. United three six Heavy clear for landing Two Four right."
So unless you're show is the controllers at LAX, that may be creating more problems than it's solving.

You can try Effect > Compressor. That boosts low volume sounds at the expense of high volumes ones, making things louder (but bringing up the noise a little, too.) Use gently, that may solve your overall volume problems without creating harshness.

Amplify and its cousin Normalize just manage overall volume like turning up and down the volume on your radio. People find right away that they start running into peak volume damage using only those two. You can check for that with View > Show Clipping. Overload damage is shows by red stripes in the blue waves.

And if you just can't make it all fit any other way, then yes, Leveler may be for you but I'd be happier with that if you weren't complaining about harsh distortion.

And just because we've taken it this far, listen on somebody else's sound system. I got a pair of terrible headphones once and I caught it before I tried mixing anything.

Koz

You can go a very long way by just suppressing the frequencies around 3KHz, the telephone frequencies. Try using the left hand dip on this pattern but return it to zero around 7KHz and flatten out the haystack bump on the right.

http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 70#p220158

Stuff at 10KHz, if you can hear it at all tends to sound crisp and clear, not icepicks in your ears.

Koz

I still had the original curve.
Make the curve deeper -- further down-- to increase the effect.

Koz

DXPro wrote: When I mentioned harsh, what I meant was that at higher frequencies the mic can distort a bit ...

A de-esser plugin will selectively (dynamically) reduce areas with lots of high-frequency content [sibilance]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-essing

"SpitFish" de-esser

"LISP" de-esser

Sorry for a very late reply. I have put acoustic foam around the walls of the area I want to do my recordings in. I took off the foam cover on my NT1-A mic and did a recording. Here is a short bit of it. Its recorded at 24-bit 1 Channel Mono, 48Khz. It hasn't been edited in any way.

I kept the input gain low so it wouldn't pick up any other sounds other than my voice (it was recorded in a quite quite room anyway, I just noticed when I upped the gain, the self noise, maybe of the preamp, a Alesis i02 express USB, got worse, so tried to avoid that). There is a slight echo, I think because it picked up my voice coming of a small hard area of my desk I didn't have foam covering properly.

I would not be using Leveler. Leveler is a brute force peak limiter and intentionally creates distortion. We are considering dropping leveler as the only use any of us have found for it is to create Air Traffic Controller voices.

I didn't know that, I'll avoid that in future. Relatively new to this, so have some learning to do. Thanks so far everyone for your help. I have the recording as best as I can get it on this project file, so can anyone help me equalizing and getting it to sound right?

DXPro wrote: Here is a short bit of it ...

Attachments NT1A_Test.aup (1.31 KiB)

.aup files don't contain any audio , you should post an audio file which either in WAV, FLAC format.
NB: I think the limit for an attachment here is 1Mb ,
so that translates to a 16 bit-depth WAV file of about 10 seconds @ a sample rate of 48KHz (mono, not stereo),
about twice that duration if you use FLAC .

For longer files consider uploading to a file-sharing website, or something like SoundCloud , and posting a link to the audio here.

Ok, here is a 24-bit FLAC 10 second clip of my audio recording.I think the reason I was getting distortion and my recordings didn't sound good before is because I was using a leveler and doing other things before equalization and I wasn't sure what to do with the audio to get the right volume levels before doing any EQ on it. This file is the unedited audio clip. I tested with Normalize then equalization and it sounded much better than I have had the audio before.

DXPro wrote:... I wasn't sure what to do with the audio to get the right volume levels before doing any EQ on it. This file is the unedited audio clip. I tested with Normalize then equalization and it sounded much better than I have had the audio before.

NT1A_Test.zip Audio Test FLAC (713.63 KiB)

It sounds good to me once normalized to 0dB to maximize the volume ...
As for equalization my only suggestion would be to remove the infrasound, this does not produce an audible change but it makes the sound-wave more manageable if you were going to apply a noise-gate to attenuate the breath sounds between words, or apply dynamic-range-compression , or truncate silence to reduce the gap between words,