About specialized hardware/software: There exist both hardware and software of all sorts that could be utilized to further study the tapes. Technical companies such as Aerospace Corporation as well as companies that I myself have worked for, as well as university labs that I have worked in, have the sort of equipment that could be applied to studying the tapes. There is probably also specialized software, in particular, that could be used specifically to identify speech patterns and things such as that. However, this is entirely unnecessary because one can easily show that the alleged conversation contains characteristics that are not characteristics of human speech.

I don't believe that Aerospace Corporation, if they did anything at all, did anything different than what I did except to agree with Detective Hickman. They probably did some noise reduction and some expansion and/or compression with gain. That's all that needs to be done to bring out the alleged conversation. Once you've done that, you can filter it and determine that there is too much wrong with it to be human speech. You can also compare different portions of the tape and hear that there is some repetitive noise. Unfortunately, it appears that some people assumed that this was speech and concentrated on what they thought was being said rather than on trying to determine whether or not this was even speech at all. In other words, based on the stories that have been circulated, it appears that no skepticism was applied to the assumption that these noises were conversation.

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A short note on the CD: That CD is of VERY poor quality. I suggested in my report that the DA's office should have those done over again from the evidence tape.

And on "Q Notch Technology." Sounds pretty spiffy, doesn't it? This is a filter. High-Q or variable-Q notch filter. They may have swept the value of Q or something like that, but it's just a variation of what I did with filtering and with a fancy name. What I would be concerned about is that they may have simply varied Q until they distorted the signal enough to make it sound like whatever they wanted it to sound like RATHER than use the filter to try and exclude conversation. (If you fail to exclude conversation, then you must include it as a possibility.) It's probably possible to use high-Q filters to CONSTRUCT conversation from a signal with a lot of noise, such as that noisy CD. If the signal is noisy enough, you can construct whatever you want. If they'll write up what they did, including desciptions of any specialized algorithms, I'll run the same tests.