Table VIII.
Transcribers’ anecdotal observations on the strengths and weaknesses of the two audio systems.
| Observations on Signal Quality | Analog | Digital |
|---|---|---|
| Could hear some things more clearly on digital system but would need to listen to the same sample on each system side by side to confirm this impression | (+) | |
| When the original audio was “muffled,” quiet, or not clear, it was degraded on both the analog and digital systems. Still, I was able to hear some things more clearly in the digital system. | + | |
| I felt more confident transcribing using the digital system because the sound quality was generally better than that from the analog system. The signal seemed less distorted, and I was better able to hear fricative distortions, voicing changes, and the presence (or absence) of word final consonants, which are typically brief and weak. | + | |
| There seemed to be fewer times when I used the “benefit of the doubt”a rule using the digital system. For example, I was more likely to perceive a dentalized /s/ without second guessing myself. | + | |
| Observations on Operational Features | ||
| The tapes had to be rewound, fast-forwarded, and played at regular speeds to find the conversational speech sample among the other speech tasks in the assessment protocol. | (−) | |
| One tape was “eaten” by the analog system and it took me 20 minutes to repair the tape. After repair, the tape was still a little wrinkled and frayed, and that section did not play well. | − | |
| The disc drive was sometimes noisy (humming, rattling) when the disc was spinning in the drive. But once loaded, the disc could be removed from the drive so that this noise was not a problem during glossing, transcription, and coding. | (−) | |
| I felt less confident judging appropriate resonance using the digital system compared to the analog system. | − | |
| It took anywhere from 30 seconds to almost 2 minutes to open a .wav file in the digital system. | − |
a
The “benefit of the doubt” convention is used when a transcriber is in doubt about the transcription. The convention is to transcribe all such occurrences as correct.