Vocal distortion(?) but not clipped in waveform

The distortion you're hearing may be due to overloading or poor mic technique. In Adobe Audition, try using the "Clarity" and "DeClipper" effects to reduce distortion. For future recordings, advise the sound team to ensure proper mic levels, avoid excessive gain, and use high-quality mics. Encourage them to monitor audio levels closely during recording to prevent clipping.

i've had the same problem but it is possible to fix!
What you want to do is:

1. Open you clip in premiere pro.

2. Use the gain fucntion to make the sound clip. This have to be done very carefully because you want to make the signal clip but without loosing too much of the valueable informaton that is left. The first time you do this you want to set it to whatever Adobe say is the max peek of the track and then gain it with +1 db

3. The you export this soundfile as WAV

4. Import the sound you just exportet and open it with adobe audition

5. Go a head and use the declipper on the track. I suggest using the heavyclipped version.

6. Check for places the tracked is clipped.

What now happens is that audition begins to detect the clipping and can therefore fix it

7. Look at the repaired waveform. You now gain some of the dynamic range back and lose the distortion in the voice.

8. What you can now do to perfect this tecnique is to repeat step 2-7 and increase the db in step 2 with +1 for each time. You will soon hit a sweet spot where your sound in this example will sound almost perfect!

Hope this helps

n8crocker  wrote   Also, since they'll be sending me more files in the future, what guidance can I give them to pass along to the sound person to ensure the handhelds come in clear?

Simple - turn down the mic preamp gain. What's happening is that the first stage (the preamp) is being overloaded - quite a bit. They need to adjust the gain so that it's not distorted, rather than just cutting the output level, which is probably what they've done here. Also with a hand-held mic it's a good idea to have a limiter on the output before it gets recorded - this can make everything a little easier on the audience! Basically they need to learn how a desk works...