Audio effects make this book unlistenable

I'm a Music Technologist, and I have a PhD in that subject area. And so I know about audio (including the spoken word), and I know about production (the process of making a recording sound professional). When I started listening to this book, I thought that the idea and story wasn't bad. I'm a Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I love the city, and since I couldn't travel there (due to lockdown under the pandemic) I could at least travel there in my mind.

Unfortunately there is one big thing which stops me listening to this audio book, and that's the awful effects which are added to the narrator's voice. When one character is thinking, a terrible reverberation is added to the voice which makes the narration almost unintelligable. It is really jarring, as are some of the other effects.

Also, it's obvious where the edits are, i.e. where the narrator has gone wrong and has had to record another take. The takes are joined together in a really bad way. The tone in voice suddenly changes, indicating a dramatic change in distance from the microphone, often midway in sentence.

The book needs to be re-recorded with just voice, no weird effects. The narrator needs to tone down the weird accents and voices associated with each character, and just concentrate on the story itself.

I've given the overall rating as 2 stars and story as 2 stars because, what I heard of the book before I couldn't listen any more, had promise.

So ... bad narration, bad recording, bad production. I couldn't finish this book.

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