Any way to remove "reverb" in recorded audio using audio effects?

Question

I taped an interview using a lapel mic. On playback on camcorder as well as playing it in PE7, it sounds okay. When I take the file and played it in our church over our sound system (which is state of the art) The audio of the people speaking sounds as if they're in a barrel. I have a soundtrack playing in the background and it sounds great, it's just the audio of the speaker that sounds so awful. Our sound tech says it sounds that way because of the small area I recorded in and the echoing is in the original footage, and that it's magnified when played over a good sound system. Is there a way to fix this or at least minimize the echoing "reverb" sound using the audio effects? Thanks!

Answer 1

One of the suggestions via Ozpeter's links was to model the impulse response from speaker to microphone in the reverberant environment. This is roughly what Gloftis would have to do:
Put the speaker back in exactly the same position in the original room with the same lapel mic in exactly the same position. Add a small high quality microphone close to the lips of the speaker. It would have to be so close that the reverberation was negligible and positioned so that breath pops didn't occur. Then get the speaker to say or read a few minutes of speech, and record the output of both microphones simultaneously. From this, the room acoustic and lapel microphone response as a whole could be computed (a black box filter response). The inverse response then needs to be computed, and you hope that such a filter is stable (not guaranteed). Then pass the reverberant speech through this inverse filter and voilà!
Another solution suggested was expanding the low levels downwards. That is essentially what I suggested in my first post. Expansion should be less obtrusive than gating (hard on/off).
Finally, the most straight forward method, if practicable, is to re-record the voice material in a non-reverberant environment. He/she could listen to the original speech and read out the material in synchronism, with the same mannerisms, to preserve lip-synch.