I’m only familiar with the Daleks of the latest incarnation of Doctor Who (in fact, only familiar with the David Tenant Who), but do the earlier Daleks sound different than those in the latest series?  Those guys don’t really sound all that robotic or inhuman, just a tinny bit of yelling, maybe like screaming through a metal funnel while maintaining a lack of emotion (well, except rage).  Am I missing something or is that not what they sound like? Doesn’t seem all that difficult to sound like a Dalek, but I’m probably totally missing the point.

The new Daleks sound pretty much like the old ones. The Wikipedia entry for Daleks says the following about how the voices were created:

The staccato delivery, harsh tone and rising inflection of the Dalek voice were initially developed by voice actors Peter Hawkins and David Graham, who would vary the pitch and speed of the lines according to the emotion needed. Their voices were further processed electronically by Brian Hodgson at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Although the exact sound-processing devices used have varied, the original 1963 effect used EQ to boost the mid-range of the actor’s voice, then subjected it to ring modulation with a 30 Hz sine wave. The distinctive harsh grating vocal timbre this produced has remained the pattern for all Dalek voices since (with the exception of those in the 1985 serial Revelation of the Daleks, for which director Graeme Harper deliberately used less distortion [36]).

Besides Hawkins and Graham, notable voice actors for the Daleks have included Roy Skelton, who first voiced the Daleks in the 1967 story Evil of the Daleks and went on to provide voices for five additional Dalek serials [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] and for the one-off anniversary special The Five Doctors. Michael Wisher, the actor who originated the role of Dalek creator Davros in Genesis of the Daleks, provided Dalek voices for that same story, as well as for Frontier in Space, Planet of the Daleks and Death to the Daleks. Other Dalek voice actors include Royce Mills (three stories [42] [40] [41]), Brian Miller (two stories [42] [41]) and Oliver Gilbert and Peter Messaline (one story [43]). John Leeson, who performed the voice of K-9 in several Doctor Who stories, and Davros actors Terry Molloy and David Gooderson also contributed supporting voices for various Dalek serials [41] [39].

Since 2005, the Dalek voice in the television series has been provided by Nicholas Briggs, speaking into a microphone connected to a voice modulator.[44] Briggs previously had done Dalek and other alien voices for Big Finish Productions audio plays. In a 2006 BBC Radio interview, Briggs said that when the BBC asked him to do the voice for the new television series, they instructed him to bring his own analogue ring modulator that he had used in the audio plays; the BBC’s sound department had gone digital and could not adequately create the distinctive Dalek sound with their modern equipment. He has used his modulator also for voicing the Cybermen in the 2006 series.

I’ve got to get to bed so I didn’t spend too much time searching for older clips, but here’s a good one from Evil of the Daleks from the Second Doctor’s (Patrick Troughton) period:

As you can see, they sound pretty much the same now as they did then.

Ex-term-i-naaaaaate!