I guessed as much - stabbing in the dark really.

What I like to do is throw myself in the deep end to learn about the software and editing techniques and I have just finished editing my parents 50th wedding anniversary celebration and putting it to DVD. I just thought it'd be a good idea to be able to make the voices of the guests appear to come from the right direction and things like that.

Also I have the kids playing theor instruments and it'd be fun to play around with that.

I have had marginal success playing around with Sound Forge and Acid and Vegas Audio. I have been a Sound Forge user for years....and I wanted to do something similiar. It's not exactly what you are looking for - but it worked for me.

What I did was take an old recording I did years and years ago from an old tape that I made years and years ago and wanted to make it sound fresher and more alive and stuff. So...come to find out - I still had the original music I used as a separate source (which sounded pretty freakin good) - so...

I took the taped recording, digitized it, threw it into SF and started playing around with the EQ (and shit) ending up with a couple of different sounding tracks...some where the vocals were more pronounce...some just some accents...you get the point.

Then...turned around and threw all the separate tracks into the multi-event editor and played around with having them layered on top of each othter. Some of the accents played in the left channel panning to right...some just layed in the background...all of them (in the end) fit right on top of the original music and pretty soon I got tired of all the phucking around I was doing because I was getting really tired and my ass hurt from sitting in front of the computer all damn weekend!! And it was a nice weekend too! It was summer time and the sun was shining and the weather was nice and all the ladies were out in basically no clothes.

But me like a dumbass, I'm sitting behing my PC dorking around with some old fart of audio that sounded like crap to begin with but when I finished it would have sounded like much newer richer crap ... so I just went up front, grabbed a beer and watched some porn.

But....latter that week I went back and finished the project and it turned out pretty neet!!

For crap, that is.

Not too sure how seriously to take kameronj but his idea is something I had thought about but still not too sure how to go about it. I don't have Sound Forge so have to rely on V4.

Is the 20 band Graphic EQ the best ioption or is there a better one.

Can any one direct me to which ranbge of frequencies carry most of the human voice, etc. I do understand about harmonics and that all frequencies can be part of a voice, etc. but there must be an optimum range.

Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers

Yes, the human voice falls in a range, typically between 80-6,000Hz give or take.
Don't know about Sound Forge, The following which I've had for a couple months is excellent also. The demo is fully functional.

http://www.enhancedaudio.com/DC_FIVE.htm

The idea would be three steps.

1. do a noise filter to get rid of any unwanted background noises by capturing silence.
2. remove any hiss
3. Apply a low and high pass filter to remove frequences above and below the speakers.

After all that then you can boost the frequencies you want with the graphic EQ or one of the other filters part of Vegas. You probably should also add a touch of Revb to add presence and depth.

While you can just mess around in Vegas, if you do, you'll also boost the noise and frequencies you don't want so best to clean up as best you can first.

Now if you want to go a little crazy, once you got that far, you could I suppose split voices from group A into one track (when only they are talking) then repeat for another group and have one in the left channel and one in the right.

Coupla things you may want to experiment with -

Duplicate tracks.
You could have several versions of the same audio, each track with its own EQ etc, each coming from a different part of the surround spectrum.

Keyframes - to make voices come from one direction, then another, the surround settings can be keyframed so they move dynamically over time.