@DrDave I’m for hire, if anyone’s interested. ;)

Here’s what I did. (The following pertains to the original audio of the entire interview that Ed sent me—not the snipped I uploaded earlier—although the approach was essentially the same).

First, I manually removed mic handling noises as well as some other intermittent sounds along with some low frequency bursts after plosives. I mostly worked with the spectrogram using the waveform only for reference.

Finally, I EQed the cleaned up audio: cut everything below 50 Hz, made a boost around 125 Hz to compensate for the lost lows, and made a dip at around 1.1 kHz. Then I made a few more surgical adjustments enhancing some frequencies for clarity and attenuating the most annoying ones.

I didn’t apply any compression, as that is something Ed should do according to his taste (and production requirements).

Don’t take this particular workflow as a template, though. Every cleanup job is unique and requires slightly (and, occasionally, drastically) different approaches.

I will try the two EQ notches--I did the roll off only. Tx. I would not have guessed 125 Hz since female voice only extends to 220 (unless you are a "tenor") but the results sound good and that is what matters!

@DrDave The 125 Hz point is the approximate peak of a rather broad boost I gave to that general region. Again, this makes sense only in the context of this particular recording. By boosting that area I also boosted the lower frequencies of the ambient noises. That increased the overall impression of the woman’s voice having more fullness.

In a sense this is pure trickery—I’m tricking the ear and brain of the listener into perceiving the spectrum of the sound in such a way that the voice of the woman being interviewed sounds—if not “normal”—than at least pleasant, and not causing listening fatigue.

Both you and @soundgh2 are right—the idea was to make it sound good (or at least better), and I’m glad that you and Ed (I hope) liked it.

Top notch people in here.