Author Topic: A couple of thoughts on quality on escapepod...  (Read 2647 times)

mb

  • Guest
on: February 28, 2014, 11:58:49 PM
Hi guys,
I've been listening to escapepod for a bit over a year I think, and am still quite addicted to it.
In fact, it's the only podcast, hell, website I slavishly follow.
I am syaing this because I think you do great work.
For that reason I thought I'd share with you some thoughts and observations I made more recently:

1. Regarding the story quality, which I find still very high, I have this vague feeling that the more recent stories are more classical, rather than as avant-garde as they have been in the past. I am not sure whether this has to do with budget, conscious choice or availability, or is purely my preception.

2. What I certainly find is that the quality of the audio recordings has declined. While it was amateurish in the early days of escapepod (understandably), the quality was very high until around EP415 or so, when - I feel it started to decline in two areas
- the quality of recodings, of which many simply are not pleasant to hear, because of noise or bad accoustics. It feels as if some were taken with a bad microphone in a less than ideal room / setting. In some cases the mixing was also off, offering unpleasantly high dynamic or just felt compressed too hard. This wasnt the case before. Some examples (424, 425, 430, 432, 435 (I mean this is a great story and great narrator but it clips and hurts your ears)).
- the quality of the voice artists: while I was always impressed by the high quality of the voice artists, more recently I did not finish listening to some stories, because the narration was simply annoying. Some of the narrators were simply not good at their job, while others are boring, or read too fast.  Specifically annoying, I found: 436 (sorry this was the worst ever, and no it's not the accent per se - 431 was totally fine, 432)

3. Finally, and this might really just be me, some narrators have started to use sound effects in a number of cases. I find this really annoying, as you can tell that these are cheap effects and I find they do not work. Creating an audio drama is very difficult, and I have only heard 1 so-far that had audio effects that were of quality comparable, to say that of a well produced music album. It is simply very difficult. Much more so than making a movie, because our ears are so much more selective.
And escapepod is about spoken word, not sound effects, so why bother? Again a couple of examples I found annoying: 434, 431

Just a thoughts, nothing more
m



matweller

  • EA Staff
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  • Posts: 678
Reply #1 on: March 01, 2014, 02:37:08 AM
Thank you for your input.