muffled voice

[kevin32]

Some parts in my voice sounds muffled. Which of the tools helps make the voice sound clearer or closer to the mic? I tried high-pass filter, but it still doesn't sound quite clear. Thanks.

[steve]

What sort of microphone are you using, where are you recording, what sort of sound card, where is the microphone positioned relative to the person using the microphone, are you recording speech or singing, any other information?

[kevin32]

It's an inexpensive microphone (don't know the brand), I keep it fairly close to my mouth when speaking (no singing). Sometimes certain parts sound a little muffled, and I was wondering if there were any options to bring out the voice in those areas, but I ended up re-recording.

[kozikowski]

Post Production rescue jobs are usually terrible, so we're really interested in preventing a bad recording in the first place. There's no reason for a microphone, cheap or otherwise to suddenly sound muffled. Are you on Windows 7 or Vista? Those two have internal tools to "help" you manage a microphone and sometimes they don't do a very good job.

Are you overloading the sound channel? This is what a perfect recording looks like when you play it back.

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/Audacity1_playback.jpg

Do your blue waves ever go all the way up and down and fill up the space? Do your green bars ever go up to maximum -- all the way to the right? You can grab the right-edge of the meters and pull to the right and they will get bigger and easier to see.

Koz