Mr. Pardo became interested in oratory and theater while a student at Norwich Free Academy in Connecticut, and in 1938, while living in Providence, R.I., he began working with local troupes, among them the 20th Century Players, which performed on WJAR, the NBC affiliate in Providence. After about a year, the station manager offered him a job as an announcer for $30 a week — a pay cut from his job at Brown & Sharpe, a machine tool manufacturer, but his new bride, Catherine Lyons, told him to take it anyway.

In 1944, Mr. Pardo and a friend, Hal Simms, who would also become a top radio and TV announcer, made a fateful weekend trip to visit the NBC studios in New York. When Mr. Pardo stopped by to thank Patrick J. Kelly, the supervisor of announcers, for arranging the tour, he ended up with a job offer. He started with the studios’ night staff on June 15, 1944, working from 6 p.m. to signoff, 2 a.m.

Mr. Pardo joined NBC just as it was experimenting with television programming. One day in 1946, the boss came in and asked if he knew anything about baseball. He and another announcer wound up calling three televised baseball games.

Mr. Pardo called the games as a radio announcer would, following the maxim never to allow any dead air. It proved to be a poor mix with a new medium in which viewers could see the action. In his Hall of Fame acceptance speech, Mr. Pardo recalled that one reviewer had dismissed his efforts saying, “He doesn’t know the game, and he wouldn’t shut his mouth.”

Mr. Pardo shuttled between radio and television for a time until an assignment he received in 1956 proved to be a keeper: the original “The Price Is Right,” hosted by Bill Cullen. The show’s popularity made the Pardo voice famous, and the occasional on-air mention by Mr. Cullen began to attach a name to that voice.

It was on “The Price Is Right” that he developed, by necessity, his distinctive elongated delivery. Part of his job, he explained, was to describe the merchandise being offered on the show before contestants tried to guess its price.