Reply #16: That's just a guarantee that his voice won't change... his body will still continue to mature in

[DarkTirade]

other ways though. Real castratos don't sound like boy sopranos any more than full-grown women do. In fact, that small vocal cords in the larger body tend to have a different tone than either a child's voice or a woman's voice. Not to mention that castrato voice training was in a slightly different direction. They were often used for very dramatic works, so the castrati were trained to sing with a lot of vibrato and an almost sobbing sound in their tone half the time.

There's actually a recording of one of the last living castrati floating around the internet somewhere, and although he's a bit past his prime you can definitely hear a difference between how his voice sounds and how an operatic woman's voice of a similar age would sound. Unfortunately the site I found it on didn't have an mp3, just a little flash music player with that embedded in it and I didn't know how to save it from that. And I don't have it bookmarked.