davek

[Please do not post this review if the audio file will be corrected. Thanks!]

"The Secret Agent," by Joseph Conrad. Blackstone Audiobooks. Format 4 file dated 23 April, 2009.

I can't comment fairly on the performance or story; this "review" is intended to communicate that Audible's file for the Blackstone Audio edition of Conrad's "The Secret Agent" has glitches and, overall, sounds very bad (and I'm no audiophile).

Nearly half of Chapter 10 is missing: The audio cuts out at, "...He knew he would be welcomed there. On entering the smaller of the--" and continues with, "Chapter Eleven..."

The very end of chapter 12 is also missing: The audio cuts out at, "...Its attitude of repose was so home-like and familiar--" and continues with, "Chapter Twelve..." (This was particularly annoying as it comes at what is possibly the most suspenseful moment in the book, the plot of which deals with time-bombs. The previous paragraph reads, "Mrs. Verloc cared nothing for time, and the ticking went on. She concluded it could not be the clock, and her sullen gaze moved along the walls, wavered, and became vague, while she strained her hearing to locate the sound. Tic, tic, tic." You won't find out what the ticking was in Audible's version!)

There are several other instances where it sounds as if the audio drops out for a moment. As far as I'm aware these occurred at the end of sentences, and I don't know if anything is actually missing (apart from the tail-end of a word).

Hopefully the good folks at Audible can and will correct this.

Overall, the sound quality is extremely poor and has a "hollow" sound to it as if it were subjected to extremely heavy-handed noise/tape hiss removal. This could explain the momentary drop-outs: quieter details of the narrator's speech may have been filtered out along with some noise/hiss. It doesn't seem to be merely the [expected] result of compressing about 8 1/2 hours of audio into 119 megabytes. Not having heard the original Blackstone audio, though, I can't be sure.

Thank you.