K.I.T.T 's voice was vocoded. I would imagine the post sound production team was coloring the dialog with a 'coder of some sort.A good example of what I'm talking about is the Knight Rider intro (I'm not allowed to post links, just YouTube "Knight Rider intro", first result). The dialogue has a very colorful sound to it. Although Knight Rider is an extreme example, everything produced back that seemed to have that quality, to an extent.
If you want that 1980 Commerical TV Sound - start by limiting the highs and lows - and controlling your mids - some voices worked with 1980s TV and alot didn’t - but the primary ones who did were low mid forward with a distinct sound to the vocals - Knight Rider - classic example - Richard Basehart has a color to his vocals that you won’t get unless you have Basehart - now audio in things like Ferris Buellar - snappy sounds that are frequency limited - Giving everything it’s own sonic space - then when the Vocals come in - you duck the back ground and go full range on the vocals - of course they are also HPF and LPF to highlight the vocal without a lot of extraneous noise.I'm working on a video project where I'd like to reproduce the sound of 80s movies and tv. There's a certain warmth and resonance in that old material that I can't seem to reproduce, despite my hours of applying different effects, equalizing, compressing, and trying many plugins.
I hope someone can shed some light on this for me!