Reply #80: Bravo. Good explination. As an audio expert let me add my comments.

[slampoet]

The audio on this tape and all the ones since 2002 is horribly distorted and has nearly every frequency above 2000 hertz removed. It sounds like this was done with a non-resonant Low Pass filter, a digital one. That kind of filter is standard in video editing software like Adobe Premier and Vegas Video.

If the video was edited with a circa 2000-2005 software, then why is the camera used not a digital camera? All the video shot before shot in caves before 9-11 was with a digital camera.


The frequencies above 2000 hertz up to 5000 are the area that our ears are most sensitive towards and contain the most information for distinguishing between people's voices. (Fletcher-Munson curve etc.)



Also why in some of the videos is Bin Laden speaking directly into a microphone yet the audio has the rooms' echo?

If Bin Laden is speaking into a mic (a cardioid mic pointed up at his mouth) then there should only be the direct sound of his voice and a little echo off the wall in back of him. Any person recording him would have fed a line from the mic he was talking into DIRECTLY into the audio jack on the camera.

Yet in the videos we can hear that the audio has the echo of the room in order to give the impression that he is speaking in a room with lots of reverb. This means whoever doctored the audio wanted to give us the impression that he either A) was speaking to a room full of people and the mic that can be seen is for a sound system, or B) they added reverberation to obscure something in the audio that needed to be hidden. My guess digital aliasing from a particular kind of voice morphing. Either that or they got a "Rich Little" and want to add enough noise that people can't hear the difference in voices.

I have gotten a good copy of this suitable for spectrogram work and will be reporting on anything i can find.

But let this be said. If i had to do a job like this under any conditions, I'd expect my work to be MUCH better than this, whether i was doing a real interview and then smuggling tape by camel or if i was in Blackwater's basement with a Macbook and some old grainy archive of stuff.

Remember that a good digital camera can shoot BETTER than broadcast video, cost less than $300, be smaller than a juicebox, can connect to the internet in seconds, and can save the video and audio to a Flash Ram Card so small you could fit it under a postage stamp. You can fit a whole recording studio in your pocket and a full fidelity hear-a-flea-fart microphone in the other pocket and both camera and mic can run off of the batteries found in every land in the world.

There is not such a thing as "He's in a cave" when it come to this.


The audio in these videos is VERY suspicious.