I really like librivox.org. For those of you who may not have heard of it before, it’s an effort to take works in the public domain and record them as mp3 and ogg files for anyone to download. It’s an awesome resource: I’ve listened to many of their recordings, and while the quality can be somewhat variable, most are excellent and well worth downloading.

Today I found a couple of interesting items though that were a bit different than their normal literary fare. When you are recording for librivox or a podcast or whatever, the questions always come up: “what recorder should I use?” and “what microphone should I use?” To answer that question, librivox merely accepted submissions of the same poem being recorded by different devices and through different microphones, and let you hear the difference and decide for yourself.

Recordings on MP3 players and other portable devices
Recordings with different microphones

It is a bit difficult to normalize the results, as the recordings were done by different people in different places at different time, and with differing amounts of post processing, but you can consult the links to both project’s websites to gain more information. Pretty neat!