Soundbooth has started ‘soundstaging’ characters when more than one character is present in the ‘scene’. This means that the regular narration is balanced center, but when one character ‘talks’ to someone else the majority of the volume for that dialogue comes from either the right or left speaker/headphone depending on where on the soundstage the editor places that person. Person A is usually center right, Person B center left, Person C far left.
For me, soundstaging an audiobook is fairly disorienting. Without visual cues that would put context to where in a scene the characters are a book relies on imagination. When imagination is circumvented by forced perception shift it’s quite annoying. No matter where you imagine characters to be, the soundstaging forces them somewhere else (usually to the MCs immediate left).
I’ve reviewed recent Soundbooth releases before noting the soundstage problem and have chosen to avoid these books. In this case I didn’t hear anything in the sample audio, or it was too subtle to notice. I bought it, later noticed it was staged, decided to finish it anyways.
I wish I hadn’t.
You know when you rough draft an essay and it has notes in the margins and sections missing with notes to “add something here later”. This release is the audio version of that rough draft. There’s random dialogue mixed on top of other characters, later in the book there are sections just missing outright.
I haven’t decided if I’ll return it yet. I am mildly annoyed. GG sounbooth.