Ya, like ye said your man is pronouncing some things oddly, what got me as well is when he said "Táim ceart go leor", with the leor pronounced like lore in English. But, then again, he pronounces some words well, like orm (with the glide vowel).

Your one seems to be better alright, its especially noticeable when she says "go raibh maith agat", with the trilled r.

Then again, like ye mentioned, how much is it to do with slowing down the speech and trying to over-emphasis certain parts of the word. The pronunciation is fairly void of any dialectal character as well. Though, I would think, based on the accent and rhythm of speech that your man is from Cork; not sure about your one.

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Please wait for corrections/ more input from other forum members before acting on advice

no he's from Gleann Cholm Cille, as far as I know

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

They don't sound native to me either.
As you said, the woman's pronunciation is a bit better but there are errors (she pronounces "bualadh" as if it were "buaile"). The man's pronunciation is definitely a learner's one.

But *sigh*, aren't most recordings in learning material recorded by non-native speakers anyway?
Apart from Learning Irish, I don't remember anything that is recorded only by native speakers. Even in Now You're Talking, there are a few speakers who have the accent of "Ulster English" in Irish.
I think editors will never understand what a native speaker is and why it's logical to learn a language from native speakers rather than from other learners...

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

Is he? For some reason I thought he said Gaoth Dobhair, but it's been a couple of years.

Edited to add, I just checked, and his bio says "Éamonn Ó Dónaill is originally from the Gaoth Dobhair Gaeltacht in Donegal."

Redwolf

So I've had a listen to some of the recordings from Gaeilge Gan Stró, and they sound pretty good to me. They are a bit faster than the recordings on "Spoken World," but still slow enough for learners to follow (and to be honest, I think it's possible for recordings for beginners to be TOO slow...as others have noted, it can make the words sound artificial and overly-articulated).

In case you're interested, here's a list of the actors who participated in the recordings. You might be able to look some of them up and see what their backgrounds are:

Helen Hegarty
Siobhán Patten
Éamonn Ó Dónaill (aka, the author!)
Cóilín Ó Floinn
Dairine Ní Dhonnchú
Marcus Lamb
Neasa Ní Chiaráin
Sibéal Davitt
Tristan Rosenstock

The presenter is Bernardine Nic Giolla Phádraig, but I think she only does the English portions.

Redwolf

Go raibh maith agat, everyone who's weighed in here! And thanks, Redwolf, for going out of your way to contact people, dig out the book and have a listen, and everything else. It gives me a bit of confidence that my ear can discern this kind of issue in the materials I'm being presented with, plus confirmation of my concerns that the quality of exemplar speech is an issue I should continue to watch out and listen for as I learn. I've read of this being a problem with LIving Laguange Russian as well.

It's really a pity, because otherwise I was prepared to really like this book/CD product, as it seemed well gauged to meet my needs as a learner. All of the exemplar words and sentences in the book are spoken on the CDs, and there were six CDs in the package, including three that did not require the book, to make them good for use in the car, during exercise, knitting, etc. The book has enough clearly explained grammar to keep me feeling secure in my understanding what's happening (well actually I skimmed a few chapters ahead to satisfy my grammatical curiosity, but I'm like that).

I do agree that overly slow speakers can be a problem, both in how it exaggerates how the words are actually spoken, and how it leaves the learner unprepared for real speech. I don't know how much ahead of the general learner I am here, but having used slow-downer software learning music, it came naturally for me to use slow-downer software on example speech that's too fast for me. Here I'm talking about the example speech in Teach Yourself: Complete Irish by Diarmuid Ó Sé -- we haven't talked about the quality of that one yet, as none of us have example links online. It's the book that has the woman speaker I really like, because her speech challenges me a lot. Anyway, the speakers go much faster in this edition of Teach Yourself, which I think is a great thing for learning how language is really spoken.

ETA: Yay, I've earned my Edit button. No matter how often I preview, I always find grammatical and spelling errors after I post.