Great Content, Uneven Mastering.

I'm a big enough fan of fan of the books that the negative reviews of the sound quality didn't deter me from buying this item, especially given the low price. Yes, the sound quality is pretty lousy at times: on a few occasions the speech is garbled and/or muted to near-unintelligibility, and the interstitial music levels are way too high throughout. But rather than characterize the effect as being ear-bleedingly awful, I would say that it's a mildly irritating nuisance to the listening experience.

Apart from the lacklustre sound engineering, the adaptation and the performance are excellent. The amusingly futurismic musical effects are just as dated as the golden age SF motifs of the narrative, and so add subtext: the past imagining the future.

On the basis of great content with poor audio quality, I was going to rate it three stars out of five (three and a half, if I could). However, today I found out that the show is also available free of charge from another site, and judging from the reviews over there (and a cursory random listen on my part), that version does not suffer the audio quality problems that this one does.

Presumably somebody at ABN (the distributor) dropped the due diligence ball when acquiring the material from the BBC. If the series truly has been released to the public domain by the BBC (as claimed by the uploading party on archive), then it's ridiculous that a commercially distributed version should have inferior sound quality to the publically available one, $2 price-point or not. Even if the archive item is an illicit upload by a fan, the fact that a superior digital version exists at all should make Audible embarrassed to be hosting this one.

99 people found this helpful

How can you go wrong with a must read book for $2

Well they found a way! This is so over produced with music effects and poor control of the sound volume, the book in unlistenable.

You get a couple of lines of dialogue then some weird loud music. It is also very hard to follow a conversation because they have one person talking so softly with a low volume and the other one set high. So if you set your volume so you can hear the lows you get blasted when the other guy talks or the music kicks in.

Someone took this in post production and ruined it!!!!! Luckily Audible has an excellent rendition of Foundation it will cost you quite a bit more but it is worth it; just click on Isaac Asimov’s name above.

136 people found this helpful

Performace Great/Audio not so

I am a great fan of Asimov's Robot & Foundation series, I've read all of the books and want to listen to all of them also. My problem with this dramatization wasn't the performance, but the lack of audio editing. The voices were fine, however the sounds effects were so loud compared to the vocals that it actually hurt my ears.

18 people found this helpful

My Ears, My Ears!!

James totally got it right, the post-production sound is awful. You have to crank up the volume to hear anybody, but then in between scenes or chapters in the book, they have awful '50's and 60's sci-fi electronica that is played at TOP VOLUME! The first time this happened it nearly blew my eardrums in.

I gave is two stars because it is Asimov, but this audiobook is one of the worst I've bought from Audible. There's a reason it's only $2.

71 people found this helpful

Great idea, but poor production

The good: The Foundation Trilogy is, itself, a great sci-fi epic. This is a very good abridgement...basically, an audio play focusing on the dialog and "action" bits, and with much of the internal narration and descriptions of technology and scenery that made the full version somewhat odd (and overly wordy) are gone. The full version is pretty dry, and this is an improvement....I think this is a great idea.

Also the voice actors are pretty good...many of them are very good actors overall and they do a good job with this material.

It's also nice and cheap.

The bad: The quality of the production is poor. Some of the voices are faint and hard to hear clearly. There is a bit of hiss in the recording as well.

The ugly: The sounds effect and music are awful. Bad 1970's "electro-music" transitions and sound effects are pretty hideous and much louder than the voices (I found this less annoying listening through speakers instead of earbuds, although I still had to keep adjusting the volume). The echo/reverb effect used for the quotations from the Encyclopedia Galactica and elsewhere are unpleasant.

The Summary: I'm giving this 4 stars for a great idea and a great job until post-production. If Audible (or the BBC) could go through it and clean up the post-production, it would be excellent. I disagree with the other reviewers that categorize it as "unlistenable," but years spent of watching "Blake's 7" and early "Doctor Who" may have partially immunized me against the more unpleasant aspects. :-)

Note: There are very good unabridged versions of the 3 books of the Foundation Trilogy, read by Scott Brick, on Audible. Of course, it's 30x the price and 3x the length of this one.

30 people found this helpful

A Classic Rolls Spray Painted Paisley

This was horribly over dramatized and extremely disappointing. Did they even listen to what they created after it was in the can? The sound effects are 50s not 70s sounds. Star Trek in the 60s had better sound effects.

The voices are so uneven I can only hear some dialog in a quiet room. If I hadn’t already read the trilogy to the point of knowing what the dialog was supposed to be, I could not have followed the story. The vocalists for the Mule did not fit the part. Too strong a voice for what the character was in the book.

This was a free selection for joining and I still feel like I paid too much.

10 people found this helpful

Production quality poor. Worth 2 bucks? I guess.

Like the other reviewers, I found the sound effects (particularly the section end "music") extremely jarring. I looked it up, it was made in 1973 and sounds like it...


That said, everything else is exactly what you'd expect from a dramatization. The script is just fine, and the actors are just fine. The pacing is good, and it was (again, excepting the discordant sound effects) enjoyable.


I'd feel ripped off spending a whole credit on this one, but for 2 bucks it's perfectly acceptable. I'd recommend it to Asimov fans in particular, but perhaps not for a general SF audience. It's 3 starts to me, but it might be only 1 star for someone who loves Asimov just a little bit less.

9 people found this helpful

Good Story, Bad Presentation

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

Better audio, clear audio. I realize it's an old BBC radio broadcast but it is very muffled and the volume swings were awful.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

ear-distress

Any additional comments?

As an Asimov fan I was looking forward to this dramatization, but I was disappointed by the audio. The voices were muffled and often very low. When I turned the volume up to hear more clearly the transition audio would kick in and rock me out my seat or blow me out of my car. The tones were like fingernails on a chalkboard.

14 people found this helpful

Do not get this rendition of this book

The recording is too muffled, too distorted, and the readers' voices aren't very good either. Do not get this reading of The Foundation.

14 people found this helpful

Not bad for what it is

Here's a commendable adaptation of Asimov's Foundation stories, but probably only hard-core Asimov fans will want to own it. The original stories describe a lot of things without much dialogue, yet the writers who adapted this made quite a lot come through while still staying pretty true to the story line. That in itself is amazing. They employ a varied cast, which gives characters some personality, but even so you probably need to have read the books to follow along fully. The sound effects seem cheesy from a 21st century perspective, but they fit the era (and frankly, also Asimov's writing style). There is one big problem: The volume is low and inconsistent. You will be listening intently at high volume to hear what seems like a character mumbling, then nearly have your eardrums blown out by a random sound effect. It is certainly a product of the original recording, not Audible. I found the same exact adaptation through another source for comparison and the problem persists. Since it's not that expensive, if you're curious you can skip a couple of Starbucks lattes and get this, but you might also be able to find it (legally and legitimately) cheaper elsewhere with a little searching. Just don't use a full-price credit on it.

2 people found this helpful