Are you guys just phoning it in now? Have you given up? How did Soundbooth go from cranking out well produced audiobooks one after the next to this?
1 – Andrea literally phoning it in for this one? That’s what it sounds like. Her reading of the character Helen sounds small, distant, and tinny with very sibilant ssss. It sounds like she phoned it in, then that audio was poorly grafted onto one of the worst audio mixes i’ve ever heard.
2 – The mix. The recipe. One of the first rules of business success: DON’T CHANGE THE RECIPE. Soundbooth has embraced the opposite of that truism and went from one successful dish after another to offering one soggy mess after the next (see my Irrelevant Jack review). You’ve packed the plate with garnish no one asked for.
3 – *SOUNDSTAGE CHICANERY* – This one is the primary dealbreaker. The rest I don’t like but could live with. The volume of the main narration is balanced, both right and left audio volume are even. Soundbooth has decided to sabotage their recipe and mess with this balance when characters are speaking. The balance centers the placement of the main character in the scene in my imagination (remember this is a book not a TV show, my imagination automatically places the characters) so when the balance changes and the character is no longer center it’s disorienting (meaning the audio engineer has sent the audio to the right or left channel causing more or less volume to come from your right or left headphone). When the main character “speaks” it goes from balanced center to center right. This is disorienting. When the main character “speaks” to someone my brain has automatically placed the assumed person he’s talking to in the scene, but when that person replies (Helen mostly) she’s off somewhere to the left. This is disorienting.
In a movie or tv show you can see where people are in the scene, when effects and dialogue come from that ‘direction’ on the soundstage it feels normal. This doesn’t translate at all to a book where my imagination has already decided where everyone in the scene is.
4 – Sound effects; the garnish for the dish no one asked for, that do nothing but clutter the plate. It really adds nothing imo. Worse, and ironically the more you add here the less your imagination has to play with. This isn’t so bad, but it really does nothing for me.
5 – Music that spoils fight scenes by signalling when they’ll start and end (rather than letting the author tell you when the scene starts and ends). This is a big nono, please stop.
Soundbooth killed Irrelevant Jack with soundstaging. I’d hoped it was something they didn’t want to do that the author specifically asked for and they’d go on to cranking out awesome performances afterwards.
Nope. Goodbye Soundbooth 🙁