I haven't listened to a lot of pro audiobooks, but I did get through all the Harry Potter CDs at the tail-end of my fascination with that fandom. They were OK, although the 1st one read by Stephen Fry was far and away the best, really seriously good. The reader for the rest did lots of different voices but I found the very "rural" ones he did with thick Somerset or Yorkshire etc. accents pretty off-putting. Just too different from what was in my head when I'd first read the books. Then recently I loved Yuletide fic "The Opposite of Swarb" so much I got the audiobook of Connie Willis' "Bellwether" novel, and that worked OK - the reader did a good job and she didn't add in any superfluous nonsense. But I guess the readers aren't the ones deciding about the music/sound-effects etc. in pro audiobooks. On the other hand, I downloaded a pro audiobook of an interesting erotic short-story collection I'd liked and found it very hard to listen to. I guess this links to the other meta discussion we had about reading/listening to porn. Maybe because it was a male reader, or that professional slickness, but it seriously squicked me and I gave up on it fast. It felt, god, like actual porn, y'know, because it was a pro audiobook, as opposed to the enthusiastically amateur readings of fandom erotica which are for some reason OK and not sleazy. Because read by women? (mostly, I know not necessarily always), or because read by fans? Hmmm.
ETA: Oh, and completely agree - recordings of radio shows are totally a different thing from readings of fic of any type. But a great radio show I've just listened to obsessively is "Cabin Pressure" which I discovered via various Yuletide & Basingstoke fics. Hilarious. I keep discovering canon from fandom, rather than the reverse. Shows where my heart lies!
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Then recently I loved Yuletide fic "The Opposite of Swarb" so much I got the audiobook of Connie Willis' "Bellwether" novel, and that worked OK - the reader did a good job and she didn't add in any superfluous nonsense. But I guess the readers aren't the ones deciding about the music/sound-effects etc. in pro audiobooks.
On the other hand, I downloaded a pro audiobook of an interesting erotic short-story collection I'd liked and found it very hard to listen to. I guess this links to the other meta discussion we had about reading/listening to porn. Maybe because it was a male reader, or that professional slickness, but it seriously squicked me and I gave up on it fast. It felt, god, like actual porn, y'know, because it was a pro audiobook, as opposed to the enthusiastically amateur readings of fandom erotica which are for some reason OK and not sleazy. Because read by women? (mostly, I know not necessarily always), or because read by fans? Hmmm.
ETA: Oh, and completely agree - recordings of radio shows are totally a different thing from readings of fic of any type. But a great radio show I've just listened to obsessively is "Cabin Pressure" which I discovered via various Yuletide & Basingstoke fics. Hilarious. I keep discovering canon from fandom, rather than the reverse. Shows where my heart lies!