Hi!
The attached vocal was recorded by some indie vocalist with a blue yeti mic.
It sounds a bit low quality to me - and to you?

It sounds like the basic tones of her voice are overcompressed by the mic?

Or maybe blue yeti is a crap mic?

 

it sounds fine, as an mp3. I'm not sure it would sell me that mic, but you could make due with the results.

 

you probably need to tame some transients. but it's ok.

 

I do feel it has a bit of a proximity effect bump going on and it's kinda distracting, but nothing a bit of EQ can't fix. It's a matter of amount, the "quality" itself (which i think is that compressed feeling you're talking about) is not really an issue, at least for me.

Aside from that, high mids do feel a bit cloudy, specially on the esses or the brethyness of the voice. I could see it being a problem if you wanted to compress it heavily for some reason (because there is a bit of noise), or if you were going for a super intimate ASMR-ish thing (because of the lack of detail). Other than, it's okay.

 

SpecCraft has been a lifesaver for vocals with too many issues to filter manually with EQ. A somewhat fast attack with lookahead and around 30% adaptive threshold will do wonders for a low-ish quality vocal. Many times I've felt something couldn't be saved and then SpecCraft made it usable with very little effort. Give it a try before scrapping the vocal.