Hiya,

Last year I taped my first major show (being Depeche Mode at the Ahoy, The Netherlands) and back then I post processed it. However... this was also my first post processing effort, and last December (when being much more experienced in post processing) I came to realise that I had made some major errors on the DM show, so I decided to do the post processing all over, and at present I am at that, and I have run into a nasty situation for which I have yet to find a good fix.

The main issue is most likely caused by the very poor "el cheapo" 3 Euro mic I used for the recording (which, back then, was all I managed to find in time, and which has now been discontinued, in favour of a Sony ECM-717). Not all too surprisingly so, the mic has picked up a lot of static noise (or so I presume it is), and it causes the recording to sound very raw and 'crackling'. I have put up a +/- 40 seconds sample of it at http://www.millennics.com/test/dmbad.wav (+/- 7.7 MB in size).

Now, if you look at the waveforms, you'll readily see that it is very spiky (fortunately not all of the recording came out like this, but at least some 6 or so songs suffer heavily from this), and when playing it back it sounds plainly bad to me (ignore the somewhat muffled sound, this will be taken care of later).

I use Sony's Sound Forge v8.0d for post processing, and I have not yet been able to find a good filter or other way of making this sound better. What I would kinda like, is a filter (or so), that makes the recording sound somewhat more 'polished' and removes the crackling sound.
I tried soft compressing it somewhat, but that didn't do enough magic for my likings. The Wave Hammer works great for bigger spikes (with or without a soft limiting pass included), but often the spikes are not so loud, and consequently it is difficult to set up a good 'selective' wave hammer setting that leaves the desired loud parts alone)...

Can anyone give me some suggestions as to how I could improve this particular aspect of the recording (if need be with additional filters)?

Tnx in advance, and cheers!
MM