by daristani on November 27th, 2009, 11:03 am
I think it's important to remember that the various FSI courses were created at different times, with corresponding differences in the technology available to make the original audio materials. In addition to these differences, the materials on this site were donated by a number of different people working voluntarily with materials they had obtained from official USG sources, in some cases on cassettes and in some cases on CDs. These people have different levels of technical skill, different software for editing, etc., and so there are bound to be further differences in the end results.
And not all the materials for a given language came from the same person. I loaned the tapes and book for the second volume of German, as well as a few missing cassette tapes for volume I of the French course. I also recall providing one of the books (only) for the Serbo-Croatian course, since the previous one on the (original) site had some pages that were hard to read. In the case of the massive Mandarin Chinese course, for instance, I recall that several different people, working over a period of a couple of years, individually contributed various modules of the course, so it's only natural that there should be substantial variation in the results. So it's conceivable that you could get better audio quality by purchasing directly from the government, or from re-sellers like Audio-Forum and the like. It's also possible that, at least in some cases, what's available here is of better quality, depending on how much work has been done to improve the sound.
Personally, I'm just glad these materials are available, and I'm grateful to all those who've contributed materials, which in some cases cost them substantial sums of money, for us to use freely, and I encourage anyone else out there who's got materials that aren't on the site to make them available.