[AndrewUnmuted]

Great post.

I'm also an audio engineer. This is the truth.

In an audio recording featuring spoken voice, there are two sounds present in every recording: the spoken voice, and the room ambiance in the background. We typically will refer to the latter as "room tone."

Even though we don't usually explicitly realize this, our ears/brain implicitly do. So, when people overdo noise removal, we implicitly hear the difference since half of the sounds that compose your filtered output are now gone. We tend to associate such recognizable "noise gating" with lower production quality and we find that generally such processing leads to lower intelligibility of the human voice.

[NovemberWhiskey]

The addition of an artificial ambient background is known as "comfort noise" for those who are interested to look further into it; usually it's done on the receiver end.