What is it about the narration that bother me in this track

Question

In this, the narration seems ... something... I don't like the boominess or something? Is that overly compressed? (good example starting at 11:00)

I'm trying to understand these types of things so in my own production I can identify what causes these issues.

Answer 1

There's a few things not so nice sounding about this dialogue.

• It seems to be very compressed. There's almost no dynamic range to her voice.
• The edit is not the best. Seems like just very short fades to pure silence. It's possible to get away with cuts to silence, but to sound nice the recording has to be very clean and the edit has to be done well. In this case, the edit points are sometimes part way into a breath or just oddly placed in general, and there's a noticeable room hiss in the recording (though that could be from over compression)
• The mouth noise is pretty noticeable. A lot of it is before or after lines, and could be avoided with better editing. The rest could be reduced with tools like iZotope Decrackler/Declicker.
• The narration is pretty sibilant. Some De-Essing or simple EQ adjustment could help there.