Enhancing Spoken Word Over Tape Hiss

I have a recording (an interview) that was made in the mid 90’s on a Radio Shack hand held voice recorder.  The tape hiss, as you can image, makes it a challenge to hear what the person is saying.  Additionally, the conversation was peaking at around -24dB.

By passing it first through a Blue Cat Audio graphic eq, aggressively cutting every band except 3K, followed by the Voxformer with additional eq and compression, the intelligibility was somewhat improved.  It was brought up to -6 dB using the gain stages on the 2 plugs.

I really don’t have occasion to do this sort of restoration stuff … any (reasonably priced) suggestions would be greatly appreciated?

Thanks,
Dave

I ended up e-mailing the file off  after using a very aggressive eq followed by a compressor.  I used different combinations of eq’s and compressors with about the same result.

As you can imagine, the question has been asked many times and I found one forum where somebody had gone through the effort of ranking the various plugin “utilities” … and in general folks seem to have reasonable success with Voxengo’s Redunoise so that is the one I tried.  It took a while to figure out how to adjust the parameters … in the end, the artifacts introduced by the Redunoise plug, a swirling / fishbowl sound (presumably some sort of phasing effect) negated the hiss reduction effect ... at least in my opinion.

i have a friend with a professional studio who uses waves for this..he gets clients who come in with hand held devises all the time.,answering machine tapes.ive herd his work.its amazing what they will do.but when he told me the price he paid for it.i dropped a pebble.