I am going to dust off a box and sit with you for a while in your attic Nolan. I brought a TDK I'm A Speaker with me, so are you up for a mystery? Best genre for attic reading. Then again, there's always One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ... I love Double Talk too. I hated to give up my hardware synthesizer when I got my XP computer. I didn't want to spend as much for a Triple Talk as for my computer so I got used to Eloquence. But I do not care for the so-called more human-sounding speech. Liking or not liking a particular synthesizer is a case of very subjective personal taste. I never cared for the Braille 'n Speak voice. Joni ----- Original Message ----- From: "Nolan Crabb" <ncrabb@xxxxxxxxx> To: <bookport@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Thursday, September 14, 2006 6:04 PM Subject: [bookport] In Defense of DoubleTalk... I've followed today's discussion on the merits or lack thereof of the DoubleTalk speech, and this isn't the first time it's come up on this list. You know, there's just no accounting for some people's tastes. Take me, for instance. I guess I'm the ultimate troglodyte primitive caveman on the list. I love the DoubleTalk speech that comes with the Book Port. I enjoy it so much, in fact, that I own three--count'em--three DoubleTalk LT synthesizers, and I routinely hang them off the back of every computer I own. Now surely this makes me the haplessly messed up list member--the crazy relative in the attic no one wants to talk to and everyone wants to talk about. For what it's worth, thank you, APH staff, for licensing the DoubleTalk speech or building RC System's chips into your device or whatever you did to get the DoubleTalk voice in there. I certainly mean no disrespect to others who prefer other speech synthesizers, and I realize I'm in the tiny minority here with regard to how much I enjoy the DoubleTalk. Where the Book Port is concerned, I use the default voice and pitch, drop the frequency to three, and crank the rate to 9. That's pretty much narrator nirvana for me. :-) Nolan, who's going back into the attic now that he's disrupted the list's digital dinner party or civil discourse or whatever it is we're engaged in. LOL