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Thread How can I remove this horrid reverb/delay from this recording?

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1 How can I remove this horrid reverb/delay from this recording?
My friend got married and during the best man toast, the DJ decided that the best course of action would be to sound like MLK during his I have a dream speech.

I've tried SPL De-Verb but it barely made any difference. I also have a trial version of Acon Digital DeVerberate which did a little better but still couldn't make drastic improvements without screwing up the speech. Any ideas?

Here's the link to the audio: https://clyp.it/kfwhhkkb
2
Yikes...

There's clearly both a built-in reverb and delay. You probably won't find much luck. You might be able to deverb a bit with a subtle backend gate. The delay will be especially tricky. If anything, I might try passing the signal through a long comb filter. Might take some time and tuning to get the right amplitubes, but after listening to the track I don't think that'll be too hard.
3
You might want to try doing a couple of passes with De-Verb. Sometimes with audio restoration software, multiple passes can help. I was intrigued as to what the solution might be to your audio's problem, and coincidentally, I just got iZotope's RX4 Advanced software, which is an excellent audio restoration suite, so I figured I'd give it a try. I used the software's Dereverb module, doing a couple of passes to get rid of the reverb. As is usually the case with this type of processing, there were some artifacts added during the processing, which made the audio quality suffer a bit. However, that's often the tradeoff necessary to get rid of issues like your recording has. I also did all of this very quickly, so it's entirely possible that a slower, more methodical approach to the settings would have yielded a cleaner result.

Although the reverb was mostly gone there were still the echoes to deal with. I reduced them considerably by attenuating them by about 10 dB in the parts where they were in the clear. In the places where the echoes overlapped his voice (which were mainly at the ends of words), I used RX4 Advanced's ability to select only part of the frequency spectrum (up to about 2K or so), which I then attenuated by 12 dB. All the content above the selection was unchanged. That worked pretty well to get rid of the echoes without messing up his voice much, in most cases.

Here's a clip comparing a section of the original to that same section after I processed it. The original is first, the processed second on this clip. See what you think: https://clyp.it/mo4efgoi

I hope that gives you some ideas.
4
Quote from Mike:
Here's a clip comparing a section of the original to that same section after I processed it. The original is first, the processed second on this clip. See what you think: https://clyp.it/mo4efgoi

I hope that gives you some ideas.


Holy crap that is much better than my version. Thanks for all the tips!
5
My pleasure. Good luck!