As born again Christians, we read the Bible, but there are times the act of reading is cumbersome or in some way not feasable so we have resorted to audio versions.
First of all, we're KJV only folks so that limits(?) our listening choices and we've listened to different expressions of audiobook.
Our preference, after a few years of listening around comes back to Alexander Scourby .... the very first audio I ever heard back in the 80's.
The dramatized examples, though well choreographed, are not SO professionally done that our modern day video (we DO love the movies) ears just don't smoothly accept the words being spoken ..... There's a real reason why the movies have professional character actor determiners (CSA) ... because there apparently IS a science to what people see and hear and how the two are co-ordinated as a visual/audio presentation.
Anyway, I appreciate this post and add MY two cents' worth to the contribution.
ALSO .... I favor a male voice over a female voice .... whether that's just me or not, I don't know .... I DO know MY voice is a little high (imo) to be a comfortable audio that folks would like to hear.
For the record, Alexander Scourby is the only voice that does justice to the scriptures .... he's going the same historical way as J. Vernon McGee.
Late in life I learned a couple of things about voice. I heard the term “support your tone,” and didn’t understand it. Then I did some playing around in the shower kind of thing, and realized a little that I can articulate about that.If you read about back trouble, the best advice I got - and nearly understood - is to stand with your heels within 2” of a wall, and make your back conform to the wall. Whyever would I talk about posture and back trouble when the subject was voice? The answer is that posture affects voice and back condition. And the in obvious fact is that we subconsciously and reflexively make our own voice sound “right” to our (subconscious) selves.
Let me explain. Anyone can attempt to imitate a famous person’s voice. Some are better at it than others, but we all can consciously change the way our voices sound. Now suppose that you were to try to sound like Bing Crosby. If you walked around doing so, you would feel like a phony, like “that’s not my real voice.” Well, who is making the sound then - a swan? That is, the quality of your voice is, within limits, under your own voluntary control.
What I’m saying is that you sound the way you do in significant part because it is under your voluntary control and you didn’t choose to sound different from whatever your voice usually sounds. I have no credentials to be a voice teacher, but if I were one the very first thing I would say to a student is that my job is to teach you to sound better. And “better” means different. So you as my student have to consciously dispense with the implicit notion that your voice won’t sound different after you have learned from me.
If your posture is as bad as is true of a typical man - like mine for example - then if you do the exercise of placing your heels near a wall and making your back conform to the wall, you will make your vocal cavity much more resonant - and your voice will sound very different from “normal.” And therefore in order to profit from the advice for the sake of your back, you have to accept a change in the sound of your voice. And I don’t mean just a slight change.
And without your changing the pitch of your voice at all, people will think you have lowered your pitch. The resonance filters the higher harmonics out.
As to KJV, there is a complete version here, albeit a group/many readers reading. Even more encouraging is that a solo reader is doing the entire thing since 2015.
"I DO know MY voice is a little high (imo) to be a comfortable audio that folks would like to hear."
You have considered the notion, that's all I could ever possibly ask for reasonably. Though I would just like to say that we are all our own worst critics. What others will not only tolerate but actually are eager to listen to continually surprises me.
The beauty of the internet is that there are places that one can do an upload of a test audio anonymously, get feedback, and nobody would ever know otherwise. I put these instructions here only for documentary purposes, nothing more.
Librivox and their community encourage people to "test" and have a whole community of prooflisteners eager to give tips. Those directions are here. One could easily create a username modeled from their favorite book as a one-off and never come back if results are not satisfactory.