I have done a myriad of things, tried for months.
Yes, original session files are intact. I have gone back to them in several cases.
Initially, cleaned noise in hundreds of interstitial spaces, replaced spaces with silence, then tried to use noise reduction process to remove bg noises, like intermittent air conditioning, from under words. Errors in those settings caused voice to have a slight ring, so restarted, tried re-recording sections to repair errors, couldn’t match sound quality. Used notch filter to remove hundreds of sibilant high pitched whistles.
When I got notes from the author, several chapters were adjudged “muffled” or “echoey,” so it was back to square one. I sat with the producer/voice artist, who invariably said the original files sounded fine, but once they got to the edited stage, the notes were the same. Truth is, I don’t know what I did. I used your Clarity filter, and tried different variations with the parametric eq to try to correct for too much high end or too much bass, which is how I interpreted “muffled.” I used DeHummer at 120 Hz to try and brighten the sound.
A lot of those things just won't work properly if you overdo them. The DeHummer absolutely won't brighten the sound, either! Overdoing NR often results in sort-of 'echo-y' or 'underwater' sounds, and this always works better if you do multiple passes at different FFT settings, and don't take very much out each time. If it was basically a good recording in the first place, then doing things like filtering anywhere within the audible range is inevitably going to alter the sound significantly, and unless you are really fortunate, you'll end up losing just as much wanted signal as unwanted - effectively achieving nothing.
The other thing that can make a huge difference to what you do is what you are monitoring on. If you're doing speech, you need two things; a decent set of monitor speakers, and a decent pair of headphones. Just having the monitors isn't enough - you have to learn what they sound like with known-good recordings before you'll really know what they're doing to yours. The headphones are good for judging NR on - the artifacts tend to be more obvious using those, unless you have some really serious monitors.
When you process stuff, make a note of what you did, and save intermediate steps in the processing as separate files - much easier to go back a stage if you need to. When you have a result that's signed off, then you can ditch the intermediates.
I currently have too much work on, so I can't really help you directly at present (I tend to look at the forum whilst waiting for processing to happen, as a rule - leveraged time!).
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