In general it's quite good. The narrator, one Charlton Griffin, has a stentorian voice and an English accent, both of which go well with a tone as magisterial as Gibbon's. But every now and then, he commits what I can only describe as vocal typos. Faults crop up in the text that read uncannily like OCR errors, and Griffin just... says them, without batting an eyelash or missing a beat, even though they're clearly not what should be there.

The best one of those I've come across in Decline and Fall so far is a passage in which, after a series of civil wars and succession conflicts (of which the Roman Empire had approximately one per week for 500 years), the weary citizens had a chance to enjoy "the clam of peace."

Now, that cannot be what Gibbon intended to have there, as enjoyable as the image of ancient Romans venerating the Clam of Peace is, but neither Griffin nor his producer(s) even noticed it. I would say this is strange, but as you know, I've done some amateur audiobook work myself, so I know that you get into a sort of trance sometimes where what's coming out of your mouth genuinely does not pass through all of your brain first.

Anyway, it kind of makes me wonder if he really was working from an OCR scan of the book, and if so, why the heck?

--G.
"Ave, praetor. Glory to the Clam of Peace."
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.