[mikeshep]

I am a longtime VO talent with studio and routinely send out dry voice tracks to various post houses for broadcast mix. Recently I've been hearing stuff on-air for a local client and the VO is notably muddy and compressed-sounding vs adjacent material.

We do not heavily compress anything here. Typically for TV I do normalize for peaks at around -3db, using Bias Peak. Signal path is pretty straightforward. Neumann 49>Great River Pre to Finalizer>Lynx L22/Mac.
(Sometimes use a Peluso mic too). Occasionally will add a touch of mid-range and upper-mid EQ boost to brighten around 3 and 5k...
Many clients do insist on submissions as mp3 email attachments - in which case I at least send at highest sample rate FWIW.

Could something about the normalization level that might be at fault on my end? Any rules of thumb to live by about best average digital peaks for sending out dry tracks for Post?

Thanks for any new advice and/or refreshing my memory about some fundamentals,

MikeMich