Distortion lessening tools question

[spigmu]

The question is basically whether what I've got will do as much as anything else out there in the same budget or if there is something worth springing for. I have a vocal track with distortion of the occasional buzzy variety that I want to clean up better than I am able to with what I have, which is the RX8 Standard. What's a little odd about this file is that it's not digital distortion, so no obvious flatlining that can be smoothed out, but clearly something analog on the way in. But the distortion isn't at the peaks or even top transients most of the time, it's often fuzziness in areas well below audio that isn't fuzzy at higher levels. A mystery. Anyway, I can manually make it passable by zooming to cycle level and snipping out the worst looking cycles (and if it ruins the timing of the word duping a few cycles from beyond it to compensate), but not how I want to spend the next weeks The DeClipper in RX8 Standard helps sometimes, somewhat, but not nearly enough before it reaches diminishing returns. It's really meant for fixing the loudest, smashed things, not distortions below that (although having the thresholds for both top and bottom of the waveform helps somewhat).

I tried the Sonic Studios ICE demo, and after the fifteen minutes it took to navigate the iLok authorizing I'm not getting close to the RX8 results after futzing for a half hour

I'm able to buy something that will be better, but from reading about other options they seem to be variations of the same function. Is there anything under $200 that is better than the RX8 Standard DeClipper for this kind of thing?

Thanks much

S

[Tj Shredder]

My best results had been with RX (it was even just Elements). But if its not clipping, you need to tell us more about the source of the distortion or give us some audio examples. I could imagine some sort of AI/neural net trained on vocals could help… But it might transform it into a photoshop like joke of a different voice…