I often listen to audiobooks on longer trips, and the narrator does make a difference. I’d just about listen to George Guidall (among other things, he reads the Longmire novels for Audible) read the phone book, but with the deep pitch of his voice, especially when doing Henry Standing Bear‘s dialogue, which tends to be both deep and quiet, his voice can get lost in the cab noise, and my truck isn’t particularly noisy on the highway. Ray Porter (narrator for Jack Carr’s Terminal List novels) has a voice that seems to cut through the noise a little better.
Jefferson Mays read all of the Expanse novels, but for some reason they had another narrator read the first version of Cibola Burn, which turned out to be such an unpopular decision that Audible had Mays record it and then re-released it. I listened to the original, and it wasn’t that the other guy was a bad narrator, it was just that his style didn’t fit the series—he sounded like he was reading young adult fiction rather than hard sci-fi.
