Recovering quiet audio

[ReedJohansson]

Hi all,
I've been trying to salvage some audio from an old home video clip I found. At first I thought there was no audio, but then I turned up the volume really high and could hear something, so I began to play around with the audio to see what I could recover. I've been using Goldwave to try and salvage the audio, running a variety of operations like noise reduction and high/lowpass filters to try and save it. I'm attaching a before and after clip of what I've managed so far. Could someone try to clean this up themselves and tell me what they did? I know it won't ever be perfect, but I feel like there has to be some better methods that can get cleaner results than what I've done. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I could improve this audio? I can upload the full audio clip if need be.
Thanks a bunch,
Reed

[davexnet]

Yours sounds like aliens from space because the NR algorithms were a little too aggressive.
By reducing the effect a little, you may be able to improve it slightly.

[jagabo]

Is this better?

[pippas]

As davexnet says, try several passes of noise reduction, with less aggressive settings.

I think the guy says ' you make a snowman that's lying down'?.....

[ReedJohansson]

Both of those edits sound good. I'll try making several passes with less aggressive noise reduction settings and see if that helps. Were you all using anything other than noise reduction (and obviously volume adjustment)?
Thanks,
Reed

[jagabo]

I used Audacity and did something like this:

1) split stereo track. tossed out silent track, changed remaining track to "mono"
2) amplified remaining track to normal levels
3) low pass filter (equalizer) with a cutoff around 6 KHz
4) amplified to normal levels
5) took a noise sample and removed about 15 dB noise
6) amplified to normal levels
7) took a noise sample and removed about 15 dB noise
8) amplified to normal levels

Some fine tuning would probably get slightly better results.

[pippas]

I used a very old version of CoolEdit (now called Audition) and took a similar approach to jagabo.
I only took about 10dB per pass, and did about 4 passes. I also put the final file through a noise gate.
If you've got the patience, you could try more passes, with less noise reduction each time. Might improve things a little bit more........