For the Record: which digital media are good for sociophonetic analysis?

Linguists now have more options for collecting naturalistic speech data than ever before.

But digital compression techniques simplifiy some frequency content and discard others (Bulgin, De Decker & Nycz 2010). Lower-quality microphones may also distort the acoustic signal.

Therefore, before such data can be used for sociophonetic research, it is crucial to determine the degree to which these media affect the reliability of acoustic analysis (Gonzalez et al. 2001, 2003).