This is a fairly common practice and a widely known trick. To excite a lifeless or dull vocal, you can duplicate the vocal on a new audio track and nudge it behind about 300-400 samples. Insert a low pass filter at 5k. Add a compressor at 10:1 or more , EXTREME! Stick a Desser at the end of chain to clean up. Mix that right behind your source vocal.
Whether it be a fan or a hard drive, sometimes this does the trick. Try duplicating/recording noise to another track and reversing the phase, thereby producing phase cancellation.
We have all probably run into this problem with mixing dialog. The background noise between dialog needs to be cleaned up and we proceed to do so. The dilemma is now it doesn't sound natural, so we look for clean room background noise and loop it, but it is obvious we looped the same piece. One easy remedy is to reverse every other one and cross-fade liberally.
What a great buy this console is. Great support and sounds absolutely wonderful and pure. I like a little character, so I combine the Audient with some Neve and API mic pre's with some of my fav compressors, like a Urei 1176LN or SSL FX 384. That's just enough salt & pepper to make my kind of record.
For 5.1 Surround Sound I use the Audient ASP510 controller