Audio sessions?

[blargg]

I actually kind of agree with blargg here in that I don't really see that much difference between digital text and digital audio...

There are several significant differences.

The texts are already transcribed, indexed, and available at no charge. The work involved in cleaning up the noise and distortion, wow and flutter of the old cassette format is substantial. I've not heard the LLR audio material, but I have heard other cassette recordings from that era. It's a very, very limited audio format.

The microphones, recorders, and tape stock available at the time simply weren't very high quality compared to today's low- to mid-budget recording gear. My weekly music lessons, in elementary school on up, were recorded to what at the time was very high quality compact cassette. So I'm quite familiar with the format. Frankly, the format sucks.

Without spending a couple thousand bucks on something like a Nakamichi deck, and a terrific microphone with a great preamp, compressor and noise gate, the compact cassette is just barely adequate for dictation in ideal office circumstances. And from an audio engineering point of view, the pictures of the Ra channeling room show close to worst-case circumstances for cassette recording.

The cleanup, as I understand it, is simply to make the material comprehensible at all. Some of the audio material might simply be unusable. The ability to do high quality audio cleanup on a consumer-level computer has only recently become practical.

It takes a very great amount of time to learn how to use these audio processing tools, and then it takes a very great amount of additional time to apply the tools to clean up old audio recordings, typically longer than realtime. As the work is all done by volunteers, it may take quite a while to go through it all.

The bandwidth difference for hosting is very substantial, far from trivial. A typed transcript of a person talking takes about 1,000 (one thousand) times less storage and bandwidth capacity than a moderately compressed mp3 file. For an organization operating on a shoestring budget, there is no way to simply pretend that audio should cost as little as text to offer; it doesn't.

The text of the messages is already available. There are those who have heard the audio, and who've been totally forthright and straightforward whenever they discuss the texts. These people say that there is not a significant amount of additional information available from hearing the vocal quality of the channeled messages. The messages are precisely focused on the words used, typically with minimal added nonverbal information from tone of voice, pacing and so forth. I see no reason to doubt those who've provided this information: Don, Carla, Jim, Steve, Monica, Gary, Peregrinus, and yourself.

Remember that in Don's questions to Ra about making transcripts available, Ra was indifferent about promotional efforts. Ra said that the material would attract and find its way to those seeking it, and if even one was helped, that was enough. Ra and Don consistently demonstrated humble concern for minimizing distortions in communication. If the extra tone of voice cues from audio recordings were crucial, wouldn't Ra have discussed that, in the same way that the integrity of the photographs were discussed?

The Ra contact involved a team with Jim's role as human scribe seen as quite important. There's not a way to know, metaphysically, whether having someone else serve as scribe, using thirty year old electronic representations of the event, might not have the same spiritual value for the seeker as the use of what Jim wrote at the time.

Given how rich the texts are, with plenty to learn and understand, I see no reasonable basis for a feeling of being deprived because the raw audio isn't available.

Given the three order of magnitude difference in expense to make audio available, I see no reason to suspect anything inappropriate in the request for donations to cover the added expenses.

Given the totally scandal-free history of this research organization that began operations before I was born, at great personal sacrifice to those involved, I see no reason to suspect them of suddenly changing to money-grubbing materialists simply because they explain the time and money efforts involved in this additional work.

My genuine feeling is that the audio project is undertaken as yet another way to be of service to those seeking to encounter this material, free of any selfish ambitions for those involved.

I continue to have the utmost respect for the integrity of the LLR team. I believe that the B4 official comments here reflect the reality of the situation.

That's a good informative post, thank you. I hadn't thought that the audio might be so bad as to be inaudible. However, I'd still like to hear it. I think a lot of people would.

And I disagree on the hosting issue. Perhaps we don't have to host the whole of the Ra transmissions all at once free of charge. That would take a substantial amount of money. But there are hosts that give enough free storage space (albeit usually ad supported) to hold the audio contents of one session. People would like to hear it, I would like to hear it. If there are any sections that are discernible, cut it, host it, let the people hear it. I can find no actual Ra recordings on the internet to hear, and that bugs me.

I wouldn't ask for the people running L/L Research to put a halt on all other operations and devote their own personal money to what I have requested. I never asked for that. But I see no reason why we haven't begun to see sections of original audio put up for the public yet. It would cost little to nothing to do this session by session on a free hosting service. Let whoever wants to hear it download it, and let them rehost it and spread the message.