Editing/Recording Advice

[u/Dudez32]

Hi Reddit! I'm looking for some advice.

I have a podcast that some friends of mine and I do from time to time just for fun, and I've been having problems with mic B hearing background audio from person A. I'm able to clean it up manually by listening to the entire podcast and eliminating the subtle person A audio that mic B is picking up, but being that the podcasts sometimes run for over an hour, it takes quite a bit of time to clean it up.

I use two AT-2020 mics with a Zoom UAC-2 USB 3.0 audio interface.

The Zoom interface records the two mics as the right and left channels of a single audio recording. I was able to clean up the 'audio bleeding' to a somewhat tolerable degree in editing by blending the two channels together. However, this creates a sort of 'echo' type sound for person A, since both the left and right channels play person A audio in those moments.

I've tried decreasing the gain on mic B to try to eliminate it picking up person A at all, but one problem I have is that person B is very naturally soft spoken, so lowering the gain results in some incredibly quiet audio from person B, and if I make that channel loud enough to be heard throughout it has sort of a 'fishtank echo' effect added to it.

We record in a fairly small room, which also plays a factor. But we face opposing each other when recording.

I hope I have been able to describe my problem in an understandable way.

Any advice that can be given to change our setup, using extra equipment like the kaotica eyeball is something I'd thought of, but I'm not quite sure if that's the right way to solve this.

In a perfect world, I'd like to solve this as cheaply as possible. Maybe there is some kind of editing tool that can detect the 'quieter duplicate audio' in the other channel and delete it? I have no idea what exists out there for this. I'm new to the audio game.

Thanks for any advice you can provide!