Thomas Edison died before he was able to realize his dream of building a machine to communicate with the dead. Or did he? In 1877 Edison invented the Phonograph. A grooved cylinder wrapped in tinfoil captured the world’s first recording, “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” This technology was eventually developed into the modern turntable, playing back discs cut on wax masters and reproduced on the familiar vinyl LPs that were omnipresent until just a couple of decades ago.

Marcello Bacci and Fredrich Juergenson are considered to be the first men to actually record the voices of the dead. If it wasn’t for Edison’s phonograph however, or Alexander Graham Bell’s refinements to the technology that would eventually lead to the industry standard LP record, our ability to record EVPs might not exist.

How EVP works:

Quite simply, EVP is the imprint of a spirit’s voice on some type of recording media. The voice, for some unknown reason, is only audible upon playback and almost never during the actual recording process. A common theory is that the energy of the spirit interacts with the media, in essence trying to communicate with the living through another medium.

Traditional EVP recording techniques and the drawbacks of magnetic tape:

For the most part, the bulk of EVP recordings are captured on magnetic tape recorders. Cassettes, micro recorders designed for dictation, or perhaps a Walkman. It seems to be a tried and true method that has its roots firmly planted all the way back to the 60s when portable cassette recorders first became available.

While this is certainly a viable technique, there are inherent flaws that most people fail to realize. Upon playback, the tape is “read” by a head that comes in direct contact with the tape itself. This causes friction, which in turn causes noise referred to as tape hiss. It’s clearly audible on all playback equipment. On some equipment a noise reduction circuit can be enabled to eliminate the hiss, but it comes at a price and degrades the fidelity by notching out the frequency where the hiss resides. Anything in that audible range will be affected. Another flaw is that the tape degrades each and every time it’s played back. The iron oxide or metal particles that store the signal erode each time the head comes in contact with the tape. And since tape is essentially a thin plastic film, it stretches as well. Yet another drawback is that the fidelity of tape recordings is at the mercy of the heads in the equipment. Unless the tape machine is designed for professional recording, the quality is going to suffer. I highly doubt that the average paranormal investigator is going to be hauling around a studio quality reel to reel machine…

Digital Recording:

The advent of digital recording, surprisingly, dates back to 1937 when a British engineer named Alec Reeves working for International Telephone and Telegraph in France conceived PCM (pulse code modulation) to use for voice communication. This new technology was also used during World War II to digitally encrypt high-level, Allied communications.

Essentially PCM is a digital representation of an analog signal. Instead of using a linear, magnetic based type of media, PCM uses a series of 1s and 0s to represent an on or off type of signal. In essence, this is the digitizing of an analog waveform. The digital signal is then broken up into a series of bits. We call this a bit rate. There are many different bit rates for different applications. For digital audio, the minimum commercial bit rate is 16. This is what all CDs are recorded at. In audio, this bit rate maxes out at 24 bits. This is a huge increase in audio quality. At this rate, you can hear things that the conventional 16 bits can’t capture. Much more detail is captured and a more tangible sense of realism is ultimately achieved. Quite simply, the advantage of 24bits vs. 16 provides a much more natural and realistic representation of the source.

The other component of digital recording is the sampling rate. The sampling rate refers to how many thousands of times per a second the signal is sampled, or recorded. A simple analogy would be to imagine a digital recorder with a microphone connected is like a digital camera taking thousands of digital snap shots of the source. The more samples per a second equals more information captured. The commercial CD, as discussed above, is recorded at 16 bits. The sampling rate is a minimum of 44.1 thousand times per a second. Generally, this sounds pretty good. The sampling rate for audio can go from 44.1k to 88.2, 96 and maxes out at an astonishing 192 thousand times per a second!! This is the holy grail of realism. Upon playback, music recorded in 24/192 gives you the sense of being there while the musicians were playing.

We Have The Technology

At any given paranormal investigation, the recording equipment utilized by MPIA offers the highest possible fidelity for gathering audio evidence. Our highly specialized audio capture system has been designed to operate in any type of situation. Each piece has been carefully chosen to make up a formidable array of hardware and software. This advanced technology allows us to maximize the potential for what every paranormal investigator hopes for… communication from the other side.