Best approach to clarify muddled audio?

Former user wrote on 4/15/2022, 5:26 PM

Worked on an audio-restoration-from-cassette project, namely interview dialog, for a while. A lot of noise was removed, thanks to Spectra Layers Pro and @rraud who advised best how to leverage it. The next thing is clarity. Some of the interviews were done over phone, so there is some muddled audio. @rraud suggested the Noveltech Character plugin that might help. However, could anyone suggest other measures as well? What EQ approach perhaps, filters or such? Sequence of effects chain is also important before I run the audio through plugins. If it will help, I can post some audio samples for download.

Comments

SP. wrote on 4/15/2022, 6:55 PM

@Former user You can already get a better sound with just a parametric EQ. Maybe watch the video here to get an idea:

Former user wrote on 4/15/2022, 7:41 PM

@SP. You misunderstand my question. That recording sample you provided is from a nicer mic. This is a phone conversation recording off cassette. Different, think closer to forensic audio restoration.

SP. wrote on 4/16/2022, 6:39 AM

@Former user You will get clarity by boosting the high frequencies. I would suggest you try it first like described in the video. If the recordings are missing the high frequencies because of the phones and cassette tape recorders used I could try a sample of the recordings with my version of RX which has a feature that tries to rebuild high frequencies from muddled audio. But I'm not sure how good will it work on very low quality recordings or already denoised recordings.

https://www.izotope.com/en/products/rx/features/spectral-recovery.html