I'd say the quality of the dub varies. In the beginning, it was pretty good, with understandable edits (though, sometimes lazy, blank signs for example). In Jouto... well, the saga was already friggin' dull enough as it is, but 4kids went and made it worse by replacing more of the original music and using repetitive voices for the filler characters, particularly Lisa Ortiz and her lack of efforts in distinguishing between the vast majority of female one-shots (I'm currently watching Jouto episodes in Japanese, and while it still sucks, I personally find the episodes a LOT more tolerable to sit through than the English dub episodes were). Although, in terms of faithfulness to the original, Jouto seems to have had few paint edits due to the Japanese text being abolished (and 4kids didn't go on some crazy binge to erase any writing whatsoever), with the only major problem being the music changes. But really, in the end, the Japanese version is dull, the dub version's dull (a touch duller), I'd say 4kids didn't do too bad.
Now we get to Houen... the Japanese version greatly improved from Jouto, but the dub was just god awful, replacing even more of the music than they did in Jouto (and given that this crappy, unmemorable crap has been heard for the past 6 years, making it overly redundant now), plus 4kids falling into a deeper abyss of treating their best dub as crappy as their other dubs by making several pointless edits. They got a bit lax with the voice acting, as well. I mean, watch
this clip and compare Miki Shin'ichirou's performance as Kojirou to Eric Stuart's as James, chances are, you'll notice a major difference. And I haven't watched any Chronicles episodes, but from what I hear, they're pretty friggin' awful.
It's remarkable, really. 4kids said they treated the early episodes with the utmost care when they were barely starting with the anime business... over time, they gained more influence, gained more anime licenses and.... they went friggin' mad with power, thinking they could screw their customers over all the time, never listen to them, and it wouldn't matter because they'll always have an audience, and they can throw money away to do so (useless paint edits, releasing cut DVDs and immediately discontinuing uncut DVDs with a bulls*** excuse). You know, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Al Kahn used thousand-dollar bills to wipe his a
ss and light cigars. In the end, they go and demand Nintendo for more money (either because they're greedy, or their loss of profits is finally brought to attention), and they pretty much screw themselves. Serves 'em right, I say. XD