Quote:
Originally Posted by True North
I went an embarrassingly long time before discovering that 1.5x is optimal.
it depends. If you're listening to some piker who talks to people on the phone, even 1.5 can be hard to understand. If you have some old-school broadcaster who knows how to enunciate, 2x or more can be comprehensible (it gets easier with practice).
There are some podcasts that use a lot of dumb fluffy sound effects, they can be brutally ear-shattering at 2x. Radiolab is a prime offender here (plus most of the hosts have that annoying affectation where they kinda trail off into a whisper at the end of their words, which is utterly incomprehensible at speed).