Lora Stradley manages the post-production team for Audible Studios US, and has been with us since 2006—before Audible Studios even had a name. Back then, it was just our “content creation team,” and Lora was invited to join it by a former classmate from Vancouver Film School, in British Columbia, where she’d completed a program in sound design. At first, she freelanced remotely, editing audio projects for Audible from her home in Montana, but the team quickly realized “I had very good ears,” and she was asked to interview for a full-time role. “And the rest is history,” she says.

Lora jumped at the chance to join Audible because she loves audio creation, but also because she shared our founder Don Katz’s belief in the power of storytelling and the spoken word. “We tell stories that impact our listeners, and it’s reaching people from all different walks of life, all around the world,” she marvels. “It becomes more apparent to me, day after day, what Don’s vision was for the company, and how incredible it is.”

Back then, Audible’s offices comprised two floors of a building in Wayne, New Jersey, across the street from a mall. “It wasn't like the open-office environment you see today,” Lora recalls. “There were cubicles and closed-door offices.” Her team had its own area in which to record, and a dark, quiet room for editing, called “the cave.” That's where Lora would spend most of her day, as an audio editor. Later, in 2007, when Audible made the move to Newark, Lora became a mastering engineer. “I got the finished edit and would master it to a good listening level, sweetening the sound,” she explains. “I would mix music to the tops and tails”—beginnings and endings—"of the books when called for, and I would hand off that final product to the content lifecycle team to upload to the store for listeners.”

For fun, Lora remembers, Audible employees and leaders would participate in Quiz Bowl, an audio trivia competition held in the cafeteria with teams, a championship, and even a trophy belt. There was a general feeling of closeness and community that remained even after we moved our headquarters to Newark.

Then, in 2012, Hurricane Sandy devastated communities throughout New Jersey and New York, bringing with it long evacuations, power outages, and gasoline shortages. Audible started having local restaurants provide lunch for the employees, “to ensure we had a hot meal every day,” she reports, and it has remained a favorite employee benefit at Audible ever since. But it also meant a great deal to Lora and her colleagues, personally. “It made all of us feel like we were part of a family, and safe,” she says. “That support is really what is so amazing about Audible; the people who make up our senior leadership really care about the employees that work here.”

Lora estimates she did post-production on more than 700 titles between 2008 and 2019, alone. In spite of the huge number, some titles still stick with her today, like those from an initiative called the "Audible Modern Vanguard,” which produced classic works performed by celebrities, including Brian Cranston’s narration of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and Colin Firth's narration of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, which won an Audie Award in 2013.

In their quest to produce premium-quality, unforgettable listens like these, Lora’s team is driven by Audible’s People Principle of Be Customer Obsessed. “We’re always thinking about how our customers are going to experience the story, how they're going to be fully immersed. And that's our whole team's goal: to make sure that experience is incredible and that we're elevating and supporting the author's vision and story and words.”

That means going the extra mile for every production; for instance, with a recent Audible Studios release, Timeless Seeds of Advice, Lora’s team hired an Arabic native speaker to ensure accurate pronunciation and phrasing. “It’s a very meditative, lyrical script that the author had written, and so we had to make sure that the performer recorded it that way, and then we enhanced that with our pacing and editing,” she says. “We want that final product to be amazing for our listeners.”

Over these past 19 years, Lora’s team has been affected by huge technological changes, such as the transition from physical media to digital. Before, narrators would read from paper manuscripts kept in “great, big drawers,” she says, and audio recordings were burned to CD and shipped to any freelance editors working remotely; in turn, they would send the mastered audio back to Audible on CDs, sometimes hard drives. As soon as iPads became available, narrators could read from those, and as the technology for FTP became more robust, Lora’s team was able to transfer enormous audio files relatively quickly and easily. This evolution has considerably improved the efficiency and quality of Audible's production processes—not to mention the space it’s freed up around our offices.

The advent of the iPhone also had a huge impact on her team’s production. “We used to work in mp3 audio format, which is a much smaller file size,” she explains. “But then everyone got iPhones and other devices that could handle larger files, and Audible was able to raise the bar on listening because we could provide customers with higher-quality uncompressed WAV files at full resolution.”

Eventually Lora worked her way up, becoming a senior mastering engineer, and then an opportunity arose to manage the post-production team, which takes the raw audio from our studios and edits it, doing quality control to see if the narrator needs to make any corrections in the studio. Lora’s team places those corrections and does the mastering, mixing—including in Dolby Atmos surround sound—and any final sound design, when it’s needed.

Whether the original audio is recorded at Audible Studios in Newark, where Lora is based, or in one of our other studio locations around the world, “our team is part of the process of making the final, retail-ready audio for our listeners.”

Lora’s extremely proud to have recently worked on a series of Audible Originals for kids, produced in collaboration with Disney, including titles from Beauty and the Beast, Star Wars, and Cars, in several languages. “It took a village,” says Lora, “a lot of teams working together in lockstep—from Disney to Audible’s content partnerships, our creative teams, operations and more.”

Looking back over her two decades with Audible, Lora feels so much gratitude. “I really love the team that I work with and what we create together. The spoken word, the stories that impact people’s lives. It’s why I gravitated toward Audible in the first place.”

See open Content & Audible Studios roles at Audible