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Old 10-08-2014, 05:58 PM   #31
CRussel
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Almost any narrator can be a "bad narrator" if they're mis-matched with the book. (An American, for example, reading West with the Night.) Or, as someone pointed out above, a Brit reading Zane Grey. As for accents, do you really want a neutral, accentless, voice reading reading an Ian Rankin book?

All that being said, my least favourite narrator of all time is Allyson Johnson, who reads the Honor Harrington series. Horrible.
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Old 10-09-2014, 03:44 PM   #32
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At the risk of taking heat from the PC crowd, the worst narrator I've encountered is Stephen W. Hawking.

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Old 11-05-2014, 02:02 PM   #33
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I just joined the forum and had to reply to this post. It makes me realize that a narrator I love may be hated by others. Or vice versa.

Usually, I will avoid any book narrated by Scott Brick. As he became successful, he just got so full of himself and carried away with his narrations. A good narrator should add to your enjoyment, not detract. Scott wants to be the star.

Also, Dick Hill, a well-liked narrator, does women's voices horribly. It makes me cringe to listen to his versions of females.

As far as author's narrating their own books, often it works out okay for me. I do not expect a professional narration from them. One really strange and awful one I remember was Jon Ronson narrating his book about psychopaths. He was neither a good narrator nor a psychologist, simply a journalist. He has the oddest voice and way of talking and I can't imagine listening to him again.

Another terrible author performance was Andrew Solomon in Far From The Tree. His way of speaking nauseated me and I almost had to get the ebook. He was so affected and took on a British accent as he attended college in GB, I guess. I wanted to gag as I listened!
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Old 08-30-2017, 03:47 PM   #34
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Chipmunk chatter is what it sounds like to me. I can't deal with bumping up the speed, anymore than I can fast-forward through a movie. I've tried a couple of times when I'm considering a 30+ hour book, but it doesn't work for me. Maybe if the Clip Zip had some reasonable incremental increases ...
I'm late to the discussion but I will join in. My Walkman (NWZ-A17) has a x1.1 speed increment for speed increase which is what I sometimes use when listening to audiobooks and podcasts. My player has the following speed adjustments: x0.5, x0.75, x0.9, x0, x1.1, x1.25, x1.5, x1.75, and x2.0.

While it does decrease the amount of time spent listening to the audiobook/podcast, I find the pitch increase is not noticeable unless I look for it (according to website the player adjusts the pitch electronically to avoid the Chipmunk Effect when adjusting the speed). However, I usually avoid a listening speed faster than x1.25 because sometimes the words almost sound like they bump together when listening to it.
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Old 08-30-2017, 03:57 PM   #35
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I don't have a worst narrator but there are some that are better than others. As an example, in the audiobook series A Series Of Unfortunate Events Tim Curry narrates all of the audiobooks but two. Lemony Snicket narrated two of the audiobooks and he wasn't as good as Tim Curry.

As far as general guides for narrators I prefer the following:

- If there are two main characters, I prefer two narrators with each one taking on one of the characters.

- If there is a large number of characters in a audiobook, I prefer a full-cast recording with a large number of performers to handle the characters. As an example, in the audiobook of Infinite Crisis it definitely helped having a full cast since you were dealing with multiple versions of several characters (Superman, Wonder Woman, Lex Luthor, and Superboy) where the cast members gave the similar characters slightly different voices to distinguish them. It would likely not be possible if one individual did all of the characters.
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Old 08-30-2017, 06:23 PM   #36
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Originally Posted by Solitaire1 View Post
I'm late to the discussion but I will join in. My Walkman (NWZ-A17) has a x1.1 speed increment for speed increase which is what I sometimes use when listening to audiobooks and podcasts. My player has the following speed adjustments: x0.5, x0.75, x0.9, x0, x1.1, x1.25, x1.5, x1.75, and x2.0.

While it does decrease the amount of time spent listening to the audiobook/podcast, I find the pitch increase is not noticeable unless I look for it (according to website the player adjusts the pitch electronically to avoid the Chipmunk Effect when adjusting the speed). However, I usually avoid a listening speed faster than x1.25 because sometimes the words almost sound like they bump together when listening to it.
You responded to a really old post of mine! I now use an AGPTek player that has incremental speed adjustments--the device just numbers them as +1, +2, ... +8, but they're slight speed-ups; I don't know how they would compare to the scale you mention. I've gotten used to +4 and sometimes go to +6, depending on the narrator. I started doing it with one book that had a too-slow narrator, then forgot to reset it for the next book, and now I'm used to it.
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Old 08-31-2017, 10:26 AM   #37
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I have a new worst of all time: Joseph Porter. I recently listened to Graham Greene's The Quiet American and he totally ruined it; I only persevered because it's not available as an ebook.

Not only did his cadences and inflections make a nonsense of the narrative, his voice for the title character was ludicrously bad. The quiet American is named Pyle, and I honestly thought the British Mr. Porter was channeling Gomer Pyle; the problem was that this Pyle was from Boston. All of us Yanks sound like southern rubes, apparently, even Harvard-educated Bostonians.

It's not just me; I had borrowed the book from OverDrive and when I was done, I checked the reviews at Audible, which were uniformly bad. Even had I been able to overlook the golly-shucks voice of Pyle, Porter's interpretation of the narrator lost all the irony.
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Old 09-08-2017, 11:08 AM   #38
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I've heard a few bad ones, but Donna Tartt, reading her book The Secret History, has committed a crime against humanity. I plodded through an hour, and I had to give up. Why a woman with a Southern accent would read a first-person narrative of a man from California boggles the mind. One of the other reviewers who managed to plod all the way through claims she even yawns during the performance (the book is 22+ hours).

Thankfully a professional was hired to narrate The Goldfinch, and he was one of the best narrators I've listened to.

Who else do we need to avoid?
I quite liked Tartt's voice (imho it's suitable for a youngster) and intonations, and how she did Bunny. The worst experience of listening to someone was Jeff Woodman in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Though it has grown on me a bit later
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Old 09-08-2017, 12:25 PM   #39
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I've listened to a few British narrators lately trying to voice American characters who pop up here and there in books from British authors. My goodness, it is painful for my American ears to listen to! It's set me wondering if American narrators doing British accents sound as atrocious to Brits.
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Old 09-08-2017, 12:40 PM   #40
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I'm pretty tolerant of narrators, mostly finding authors make the worst narrators although there are exception (i.e. Neil Gaimann). My problem is primarily women narrators because they TEND to have softer, higher voices that don't work so well with my current level of hearing impairment.

Not the worst, but a real disconnect was the switch from Phil Gigante reading Dan Shamble series to Michael Gilboe reading the series of short stories for that series. Gilboe is actually a good narrator, but does the narration so completely differently, it took a good hour for me to get used to it.
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Old 09-22-2017, 04:05 AM   #41
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I'm pretty tolerant of narrators, mostly finding authors make the worst narrators although there are exception (i.e. Neil Gaimann). My problem is primarily women narrators because they TEND to have softer, higher voices that don't work so well with my current level of hearing impairment.
I also prefer male narrators. And I know of another author that was an excellent narator: Douglas Adams. Just finished listening to the first 4 books of the Hitchiker's Trilogy (the fifth is read by others) and I still think he was brilliant (both in writing and in reading).
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Old 12-11-2017, 01:57 PM   #42
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Talking Problem narrators

I have a few problems with narrators. The first is a whistle, I'm not naming names but I have decided against a few narrations because the narrator whistles on his "S'.

Second is a narrator that reads dramatically but obviously doesn't understand what he's reading because the emphasis is on the wrong word, such as, "Even QUEEN Victoria could not send help." This implies that there are other Victoria's but only the one that is Queen could not help. I prefer an autoreader to this.

Third is what I call "Puppet Voices", where the narrator, doing various characters, sounds like a Punch and Judy Pantomime. OK for kids books, not good for a mystery.

Fourth is a male reader that does women voices as simpering, petulant, coy, ineffectual and shrill.

Fifth is the narrator with a long book to read so he reads it as if he's in a race, without pauses or inflections.

Sixth, is the overly dramatic reading of EVERYTHING. A trip to the office is as overwrought and fraught with drama as being confronted by a guy with a gun. I recently tried to listen to a book on astrophysics where they were trying to convey a sense of awe. Every single sentence was read by various narrators with a sense of awe. I blame the director for that.

Wow, that felt good to get all that out. As Shrek would say "Better out than in."
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Old 12-11-2017, 07:28 PM   #43
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Second is a narrator that reads dramatically but obviously doesn't understand what he's reading because the emphasis is on the wrong word, such as, "Even QUEEN Victoria could not send help." This implies that there are other Victoria's but only the one that is Queen could not help. I prefer an autoreader to this.
I've noticed that quite a bit, and it always throws me.
I wouldn't say I'd prefer an autoreader, though. Thankfully I don't notice it that often.

That reminds me, though, that I just ran into one book where I think I have to blame the producers for making the narrator look bad.
There were so many times where the narrator re-read a line he just spoke, sometimes because he caught himself incorrectly emphasizing a word like that, that I could have made a drinking game out of it.
Isn't there some editing process for those sort of things? Was there perhaps some button the narrator forgot to press that indicated where bad takes were to be edited out?
I don't know, but if the misreads were removed, the book would have been 15-20 minutes shorter.

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Old 12-13-2017, 12:05 PM   #44
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The narrator that is the worst is quite prolific, we are probably thinking of the same person. After a while I developed a mental over ride that put his emphasis on "ignore", hahaha. Otherwise he would have driven me nuts.

Also quite comical is when the narrator picks up the narration on a different day and sounds completely different. They leave off midrange and reading at a clip, they pick up in a slow stately baritone.

Last edited by Penelope Snopes; 12-13-2017 at 12:08 PM. Reason: Additional thought
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Old 03-12-2018, 07:40 PM   #45
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I wanted to get into the Dragonlance books, but Paul Boehmer is an absolutely awful narrator.

People...describe his...narrating as. Shatner-esque.

https://www.audible.com/pd/B00ATEERJ2
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