allison dufty

Hands down, the absolute best thing about Alcatraz is the audio tour. ... If there was the equivalent of an Oscar for historical audio tours, Alcatraz would be Meryl Streep. ... [We] would constantly look at each other and point to our little audio machines hanging around our necks. "This is awesome," we screamed over our earphones across D-Block.

Hands down, the absolute best thing about Alcatraz is the audio tour. ... If there was the equivalent of an Oscar for historical audio tours, Alcatraz would be Meryl Streep. ... [We] would constantly look at each other and point to our little audio machines hanging around our necks. "This is awesome," we screamed over our earphones across D-Block.

This entry relies on and wins by an old fashioned notion ... tell a good story, and do it well. Walking the line between drama and fiction, tantalizing exposé and puritanical facts, these snippets of history would enhance any visitor's trip through the Museum of Sex. ... The scripts are beautifully paced, ... probably the most appropriate of all technologies for this topic. Allows the visitor to imagine what might be difficult (or certainly risque) to show.

The kids and I took the "family" tour while my husband listened to the standard adult version. After seeing us laughing and my kids talking excitedly, he switched over to our version too. The tour was good at pointing out things that kids would be interested in, giving a little bit of a history lesson and telling some of the rules of the house that pertained to the Vanderbilt children ... a life of privilege and restrictions. My 4-year-old was so impressed that he came home and wrote rules for our house. After the tour was over, both my kids asked to do it again!

The audio tour was one of the best I've ever done. Before I got there I thought, how is it possible for an audio tour to be *that* good? But it is, trust me. ... Brilliant. Please go, you won't regret it.

When the third graders put the headphones on and heard the silly ... voice that was supposed to be the painter's mustache, they all broke into giggles. Nothing like seeing giggles coming from 8-year-olds in an art museum.

Beautiful and Brilliant Audio Tour. We have visited several such mansions in other parts of the country, but The Breakers offers a self-guided audio tour with admission that is by far the best we have experienced.

The Marble House Audio Tour successfully avoided many of the common pitfalls of historic house tours. It gave substantial context by providing multiple points of view. The creative blend of voices and original materials made the rooms come alive with the history of the House and evoked a real space.

There are adverse opinions about audio tours, that they tell visitors what to think, instead of letting them see. In this case, though, the aural guide is a revelation. Art history is a unique language, one I often can't fathom, multisyllabic gobbledygook bordering on comic relief. So when a curator says ... that "the hill is Wyeth's father," my first response, as well as my second and third, is "yeah, right." But then Wyeth, a half century later and almost 90, says in my ear, "The hill became a portrait of him," speaking of his father, who died on the other side of the mound. ... And I go, "whoa," because I'm wrong about the whole business.