Bad Audio Narrations.... thoughts on the Hannu Rajaniemi episode

[T.L.]

I just listened to Luke's review of the Quantum Thief and just had to add my rant to his.

The absolute worst thing a audiobook producer can do is forget the difference between an audio book and an audio drama. Drives me freakin' nuts.

Now, I love a good audioDRAMA.. I mean, listen to the BBC's dramatic presentation of Lord of the Rings, or the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, or any number of other books and they are brilliant, but an audioBOOK should be a reader, or maybe two, reading the bloody text.

Don't go throwing different special effects in the middle of the story, drowning out the words, don't go putting music over the tale, even if there's a song there, because odds are you're using some crap little midi thing and it sounds like something some teenager made in his basement in 1987.

And as Luke said, don't drowned out the narrator... that's like drawing a picture on top of the text in a book... and I don't mean like an illuminated manuscript. Normally it is done with the skill and talent considerably less than that of my three year old son (who at least might not scribble on the words).

Drives me nuts it does.

Oh... except when they did it in the Dune audiobook, which somehow blended an audio drama with an audio book almost seamlessly. Luke, you liked that one too didn't you?

Anyone else have some examples of bad or good audiobooks?

[Luke]

T.L. wrote: "I just listened to Luke's review of the Quantum Thief and just had to add my rant to his.

The absolute worst thing a audiobook producer can do is forget the difference between an audio book and a..."

There's a difference between a bad audiobook product and a bad audiobook narrator too. The narrator of The Quantum Thief was fine when he was just reading. I really enjoyed some of his voices. One no-nonsense woman sounded exactly like Judy Dench as M in the Bond movies, and it conjured up a great image in my mind (I'm not sure if I mentioned this during the episode).

Bad narrators include Wil Weaton in Redshirts, whoever did the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms narration, the one who did Doomsday Book (that I didn't get more than a few chapters through).

The City And The Stars was a good production, with a full cast of actors doing the voices. It also had some ambient background sounds and sparse music, which added to the mood even if I'd have liked it to be a straighter reading.

The Dune audiobook (the one that I listened to) was a mix of single-narrator and full-cast. It was a strange mix, but somehow worked, and it took me ages to work out why the hell it kept changing between the two. As far as I could tell it was an abridged full-cast reading that had then been "completed" by the main narrator doing all the sections that had been cut in the abridgement himself.

I liked The Rookie audiobook too, as it is read by a single narrator and has loads of sound effects and background noise. However this was a story written to be podcast in such a style, and was read by the author and produced by the author. The singular vision makes for a consistently good product.

The question arises: if there is music or a song, do you get the narrator to make up a tune? This can lead to good or bad. I liked the Hobbit's songs, but have had issues with other audiobooks.

Anyway, The Quantum Thief was, without a doubt, the worse book I've gotten to the end of. I mean the worst audiobook production.

[T.L.]

Luke wrote: Anyway, The Quantum Thief was, without a doubt, the worse book I've gotten to the end of. I mean the worst audiobook production."

Wow. That's bad. I may have to try a sample of it just to see.

I listened to the same version of Dune you did, with Simon Vance doing the primary narration. Definitely weird, but as you noted, it somehow worked. I think there is a story behind its production where half of the audio drama was made and then some of the recordings were lost, so they gave up on it. A later production was made to turn it into an audiobook, and they used the dramatic parts. Mind you, in that book, the talents reading the work were pretty phenomenal (I also had the embarressing situation of having referred to Simon Vance as Jack Vance in the footnotes of my review... which Simon Vance then commented on my blog to point out in the most remarkably professional way).

Depending on the version of the Hobbit you're talking about, one of them used tunes that were written by professionals for the book and approved of by JRR Tolkien himself. But I know there's more than one version of the book so...

Anyway, you are completely correct. A huge difference between a bad narrator and bad production. The examples of the worst three I put in the top 5 category were all incidents of bad production. As for Wil Wheton... your review stopped me from listening to the book, so I will likely never know.

[Sandi]

I finally listened to The Quantum Thief episode. I had listened to the audio book quite a while ago and didn't remember the narration being so terrible. When Luke said that it was the same guy who did The Name of the Wind, I looked it up. I believe that the U.S. version has a different narrator, Scott Brick. Now, I was as confused as hell by the book, but it had nothing to do with the narration. I tried to read the e-book and only made it through the first chapter. I decided that I didn't want to hurt my brain again.