The Best Audiobooks to Listen to

When looking for the best audiobooks, listen to an audio sample to ensure the single narrator or multicast really brings the story to life.

Having the right narrator and/or actors create the theater of the mind experience—putting you right into the story. This IS the magic of audiobooks.

For example, the Golden Age audios were cast like a movie.

77 Hollywood actors were drawn from the worlds of animation, theater, television and film, including Bruce Boxleitner (Tron and Babylon 5), Nancy Cartwright (voice of Bart Simpson), Martin Kove (The Karate Kid, Wyatt Earp and Cobra Kai), Phil Proctor (Finding Nemo, Firesign Theatre), and Jim Meskimen (JibJab, Friends, Apollo 13).

And true to the art of radio drama, all the actors in each audiobook were recorded together in the same sound booth to create a level of energy between the actors that can only be otherwise experienced in live theatre.

Listen to an excerpt of The Black Sultan, featuring Corey Burton, Phil Proctor, Jim Meskimen and John Mariano.

Want to really escape into a story?

Sound effects and music turn storytelling into a “movie of the mind” entertainment.

But not just any sound effects. The Golden Age audios were brought to life in the style of radio drama, but created using state-of-the-art sound and music engineering found in the movie industry.

This is High-Definition (HD) audio or cinematic audio.

Brian Vibberts, a six-time Grammy award-winning audio engineer brought a unique sound to each story, stating, “From western, mystery, sea adventure, air adventure—the music is so different between them that it really makes it fun to work on and fun to mix.”

Paul Wertheimer, a leading sound mixer in the movie industry, brought the sound effects together in a way that put the listener literally IN the story. Paul describes the considerable detail that went into creating the soundscapes that transformed these audiobooks into movies of the mind, “For instance, when we go into a jungle there are sounds of various insects and birds. There could be a stream. There could be a waterfall and as we are going through these areas, sometimes the waterfall is on our left, on our right, and we try to depict that by panning back and forth.

“If we are on a highway and there is a car coming towards us—and we hear them go by. There might be some horns honking, there could be sirens and all these various sounds, although by themselves are small, together make a bigger picture that we need for these books.”

The audiobook industry has worked to perfect the technology for decades, starting with books on tape, then books on CD and now you can download an audiobook right onto your smartphone with music quality.

In fact, when the Golden Age audios first released, download technology did not have the capacity for these recordings (the files were simply too big), and the range of voice and music were lost.

With the sound quality advances today, you can find these cinematic HD quality audiobooks on Audible, iTunes, Downpour, Audiobooks.com, Kobobooks, and your local library (through Hoopla and Overdrive).

What happens when you combine great storytelling, an award-winning cast, movie quality sound and music with high definition sound technology?

The most sophisticated cinematic audio dramas on the market today.

The L. Ron Hubbard Golden Age audios set a new standard in audiobook quality, earning AudioFile Magazine’s Audiobook of the Year award for six years running.

Here is a short video on how they were put together:

Hear the difference for yourself by listening to this clip of “Yellow Loot”, an adventure set against the Chang Tombs and Great Wall of China.

Though audiobooks are fairly recent, the history of storytelling predates the printed book by centuries.

Exactly when storytelling began is debatable, but it is safe to say that it was long before recorded history. There is evidence of cavemen drawings dating back to prehistoric times and the Egyptian hieroglyphics going back thousands of years. Oral stories have been passed between generations in many cultures to preserve their history and legends.

The first written story to be discovered on clay tablets is the Epic of Gilgamesh, a mythologized account of Gilgamesh, a ruler of Uruk, believed to have ruled sometime between 2700-2500 BC.

The Science Nordic recently released an article about the one of earliest known fiction works from the 1170s by Chrétien de Troyes about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

But the novel credited as “the first novel” by many literary scholars is Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote published in the 1600s.

Storytelling further evolved with theater. During the Renaissance, authors like William Shakespeare popularized this art form with several works that are still entertaining people today.

In the 1800s, with the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Edison, the first recordings of stories were made with the primary intention of assisting the blind.

In the early 1900s, radio theater was reaching millions of listeners every week. Literally, 82 out of 100 homes were gathering around the radio to hear shows like Walter B. Gibson’s The Shadow, H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which featured both original stories and episodes directly adapted from their work.

Concurrently, while audiobook recording equipment was evolving, the focus for the recordings continued to be on bringing both non-fiction and fiction works to the blind (including veterans injured during the war), with the main drivers being institutions like the Library of Congress Books for the Adult Blind Project.

It was not until the 1980’s with the commercializing of cassettes, that book retailers started to push audiobooks. These talking books, or books on tape, brought popular novels to this exciting new format. In fact, in 1986 the Audio Publishers Association was born and by 1996 the term “audiobook” became the standard term for talking books, books on tape and books on CD.

The popularity of audiobooks has exploded with the technology advances in mobile. Book lovers can enjoy audiobooks while doing other things, wherever they are, listening through their smartphone (which is with them all the time). It is this advance that has most significantly impacted the audiobook industry.

Here is what audiobook readers have to say about these audio dramas:

Listen to a sound clip of “Branded Outlaw”, featuring R.F. Daley (narrator), David O’Donnell, Bob Caso, Jim Meskimen and Tamra Meskimen.