How to make your voice sound like radio

The chain at a glance

1. High-pass filterRemoves rumble below about 100 Hz.
2. Downward expanderTurns the room down between your words.
3. De-esserSoftens sharp “s” sounds.
4. EQ boost around 3,500 HzLifts the range that makes words clear.
5. CompressorEvens out your quietest and loudest words.
6. LimiterA ceiling, so nothing distorts.

1. High-pass filter

A high-pass filter cuts everything below a set frequency, usually around 80 to 100 Hz for a speaking voice. There’s almost none of your voice down there, even if it’s a deep one: the lowest note of a typical male speaking voice sits around 85 to 150 Hz. What does live there is rumble from traffic, footsteps, the desk you bump and the air conditioning. Taking it out makes the voice sound tighter and leaves the processors after it less to react to.

Use a steep filter (24 dB per octave) and set it just under your voice. Set it too high and a deep voice loses its weight.

2. Downward expander

An expander does the opposite of a compressor. When your voice drops below a threshold, it turns the sound down further, so the fan, the keyboard and your breathing get quieter in the gaps between words. It’s gentler than a noise gate, which shuts completely and can chop off the ends of words.

Set the threshold just above the room’s own noise and reduce the gaps by 10 to 20 dB. It should open a moment before you speak and close a moment after, so no word loses its first consonant.

3. De-esser

“S”, “sh” and “z” sounds put a burst of energy between roughly 5 and 10 kHz, and close to a microphone they can sound like a hiss in your ear. A de-esser watches that band and turns it down only while it’s loud compared with the rest of your voice, so the rest of your voice is untouched.

It comes before the EQ boost and the compressor for a reason: both of those make sibilance louder.

4. EQ boost around 3,500 Hz

Your ears are most sensitive between about 2 and 5 kHz, and that’s where the consonants that make words understandable live. A broad boost of 2 to 4 dB centred near 3.5 kHz makes speech cut through, on small phone speakers especially. Some broadcast microphones have a switch for exactly this “presence” lift.

Keep it gentle. Much more than 4 dB starts to sound harsh, and it brings back the sibilance the de-esser just took out.

5. Compressor

A compressor turns the loudest parts of your voice down by a ratio once they pass a threshold, and makes up the difference with gain. The gap between your quietest and loudest words shrinks, so your voice holds a steady volume and sits at the front, which is the sound people mean by “radio voice”.

Start with a ratio around 2.5:1 to 4:1, a threshold that catches your normal speaking level, an attack of 10 to 20 ms and a release of 150 to 250 ms. Then use make-up gain to bring the result to your target: about −16 LUFS for podcasts and video, −14 LUFS for something louder.

6. Limiter

The limiter is the last stop: a ceiling the signal is never allowed to cross, usually −1 dB. If you laugh or raise your voice, the limiter catches it instead of letting the audio clip and crackle. With the compressor doing the work before it, it should only touch the odd peak.

Why the order matters

Put the expander before the compressor. A compressor lifts everything quiet, and without the expander in front of it that includes the hum and the breaths between your words. The expander pushes the gaps down first, so the compressor has only your voice to raise.

The high-pass comes first so rumble doesn’t trigger anything after it, and the limiter comes last so nothing after it can push the level back over the ceiling.

Starting settings

Processing can’t fix the room

The chain shapes the voice you give it. It won’t remove an echo or rescue a voice recorded from across the room. Before any of this, get the basics right:

• Sit about a hand-span (10–15 cm) from the mic, slightly to the side so “p” and “b” don’t pop.
• Record in a small room with soft furnishings, with the fans, heaters and air conditioning off.
• Set your level so normal speech lands between −28 and −12 dB, with peaks under −3 dB. The mic check measures all of this in ten seconds.
• Warm up for a few minutes first. The voice warm-up takes four and a half.