I see people trying to boost audio quality in post with all these effects and layers, the truth is, you can’t improve low quality audio that much, and the more you push low quality audio, the more you distort it. so while there’s no way to get around a good mic, getting close to the mic, and acoustically treating the room, here’s what I do in Audacity after spending far too much time researching this.

Click the link here to follow along https://imgur.com/GJEJb3R

Step 1, noise reduction.

So after I record, I get 10 seconds of silence, then normalize that section to 0db, this shows other background noises you otherwise couldn’t see, so undo the normalize and just select the true background noise, as the cleaner the noise reduction sample, the less it will distort your audio.

Step 2, equalization.

people just like to add a base and treble boost and move on, however the human voice only goes down to about 100Hz, so I do a little base and treble boost as shown, then do a high pass. this removes some of the boomy-ness and muddiness from your audio.

Step 3, compressor

As shown

Step 4, normalize to 0db

I do this because only the peaks of your audio will hit 0db, leaving a good regular speaking volume

Step 5, hard limit to -3 as shown

Unless you’re a professional, less is more, so give these a shot and let me know how you go.