Go Behind the Scenes of "Harry Potter: The Full-Cast Audio Editions"

A mundane commute to work can suddenly feel like a thrilling Quidditch match, with stadium cheers and the whoosh of the Golden Snitch as it darts past. An ordinary walk down the street makes the listener feel that they’re in a bustling Diagon Alley, with the sound of Hagrid’s thundering footsteps and crowds of excited young witches and wizards shopping for supplies. That’s the magic of Harry Potter: The Full-Cast Audio Editions, an immersive listening experience more than two years in the making.

“This is Harry Potter like never before,” says Hugh Laurie, who plays Albus Dumbledore. All seven unabridged books have been performed word for word by an all-star cast, with a full sound design capturing every detail and an original score. The scale of this production is beyond anything Audible has undertaken before — the numbers alone are unprecedented:

• 7.5 months to record all 7 books
• 45 days to record Cush Jumbo’s narration alone
• More than 500 characters brought to life
• More than 400 recording sessions totaling over 2,000 recording hours
• 130+ hours of finished audio
• About 9,000 individual tasks meticulously monitored by our production management system, from dialogue to sound design, to music composition and Dolby Atmos mixing

For the cast, Laurie is joined by an incredible roster of performers embodying the books’ beloved characters, including Matthew MacFadyen as Voldemort, Riz Ahmed as Snape, Mark Addy as Hagrid, and Cush Jumbo narrating, among many more star turns. “Harry Potter fans, and I can say this as one, are going to love this,” gushes Kit Harington, who plays Professor Gilderoy Lockhart.

There are also nods to special cross-over moments for fans, including the casting of David Holmes, who performed Harry’s stunts in the movies and is the subject of a moving HBO documentary. Holmes voices Stan Shunpike, conductor of the Knight Bus. “Being a part of this is very much full circle for me, considering I was the Harry stunt double inside the Knight Bus as it was whizzing through the streets of London in the Prisoner of Azkaban movie,” he says.

Working in audio is exciting for the world’s top talent, who are enjoying opportunities they might not get in visual formats. “I’m usually not tapped to play toad-like women,” muses Keira Knightly, who plays the girlish-voiced villain Dolores Umbridge. “Audio opens up a whole world of casting opportunities.”

This new edition comes 25 years after the single-voiced audiobooks narrated by Jim Dale and Stephen Fry were produced, in large part because “the technology we are working with now in the audio space is so exciting,” says Audible Studios senior casting director Mariele Runacre-Temple.

To create the rich, realistic soundscape of the books, Audible’s and Pottermore’s production teams brought the highest level of obsession and detail, even installing 100-year-old wood flooring to capture its unique creaks, and hauling luggage and an owl cage onto a steam train to record the way they might clatter on the Hogwarts Express.

Sound designers carefully interpreted the text to decide how to convey each character’s physical movements within a scene, whether it’s the rustling of a nervous student’s robe in the classroom or the confident stride of a seasoned wizard. These unique sonic renderings help listeners connect even more fully with the characters they know and love.

In fact, the small sounds are everything when it comes to conveying emotion without visual cues. There’s a word for the sighs, groans, chants, background chatter and laughing that make up human sounds that aren’t scripted dialogue: walla. A creative edit supervisor carefully selected the right sounds to express characters’ feelings even when they didn’t have any lines, then worked with the dialogue editing team to seamlessly weave together this walla with the dialogue.

Finally, once all the sound effects and performances and walla are captured, it gets mixed in Dolby Atmos so everything seems to be happening all around the listener. Rob Baker, who heads up engineering at Forever Audio, with whom we worked to mix the audiobooks, describes how, in Quidditch scenes, “Each player is treated as a discrete Dolby object,” grouping their voice, sound effects and broom whooshes together. “This approach lets us move players with pinpoint accuracy as they sweep around the stadium” in a 360-degree sphere around the listener, “alternating between the grandstand and the aerial action with Harry: the rush of wind and muted roar of the crowd far below.” All the while, Cush Jumbo’s narration is always placed in the center, which anchors the listener.

To make the world even more realistic, Pottermore provided maps and blueprints of the wizarding world so we could place nuanced details — a fireplace off to the left, for example — in consistent locations across all the audiobooks. Also throughout the audiobooks, a moving original score by internationally award-winning composer Nitin Sawhney, evokes emotion and wonder. Recorded by a 60-piece orchestra at world-renowned Lyndhurst Hall in London’s AIR Studios, the theme music evolves over the course of the audiobooks as the stories change in tone.

In the end, Harry Potter: The Full-Cast Audio Editions took an army of passionate, talented people to produce, and while it was anything but simple, the result is simply magic.

Audible customers can now experience the first audiobook in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, with the remaining audiobooks scheduled to release between December 2025 and May 2026.