edited for brevity. You can't edit the recordings of the black box but you could certainly doctor recordings from either side. It mentions that in the article that it doesn't mean anything nefarious but rather just a matter of fact. If they were edited before release, its probably to cut out silence or something. I wouldn't go conspiracy theory here.
Did you read the article? It seems like it wasn't just silence edited out.
"At approximately 1:14 (a minute, 14 seconds into the audio, which can be heard here), the tone of the recording change to where to me, it sounds like someone is holding a digital recorder up to a speaker, so it's a microphone-to-speaker transfer of that information. That's a pretty big deal because it raises the first red flag about there possibly being some editing," he said.
The next part that raises questions is two minutes, six seconds in, through two minutes, nine seconds in, he said.
"I can hear noise in the room, along with the increase in the noise floor. I can hear a file door being closed, I can hear some papers being shuffled. so I'm further convinced that, beginning at 1:14 continuing through 2:06 to 2:15, it's a digital recorder being held up to a speaker."
"But yet, at 6:17, there's a huge edit because the conversation is cut off. It's interrupted. And the tone changes again," he said. "The noise floor, when you're authenticating a recording from a forensic perspective, is a very important part of the process. All of a sudden, we go back to the same quality and extremely low noise floor that we had at the beginning of the recording."
Audio is super cheap, and easy to index. Releasing it all has zero downside yet enables better investigation. Even things like dead-air pops/hums could potentially offer clues. (And an unbroken timeline is important in and of itself.)
Someone once reconstructed an entire helicopter's location telemetry just from the dead-air hum recorded by a video camera. Don't underestimate the value of any piece of information. It's a failure if there's needless withholding.
Edits should be made clear upon release of the audio recording. The investigation is either incompetent or corrupt if it is not being forthcoming about edits to information released to the public.
In an investigation of this type, there is absolutely not to release the full, unedited copy. Failure to do so is either incompetence or deliberate malfeasance.
If you released something of that importance and edited beforehand, you'd probably say so and release the unedited version as well, wouldn't you?
Sometimes I wonder whether some officials are trolling the conspiracy theory people, by editing something without even changing anything, just so people can freak out over it. Or give overlay specific denials just so people go "aha, they only said they never negotiated with Aliens from Mars, not that they didn't meet Aliens from Mars, nor that they didn't negotiate with Aliens from Pluto".
