How to Listen Because audio recordings of good quality can be fairly large files, we've decided to make two different versions of each recording available. One format is of moderate quality and has a relatively small file size. The other format has much better sound quality and a correspondingly larger file size.
Low Quality MP3 File
The first version is an MP3 file compressed at 16Kbps. It sounds a little bit better than a telephone. The quality is not very good, but eight minutes of audio compresses to just one megabyte of data.
The low bandwidth files are great if you use a dial-up modem, do not have much disk space, or want to put a lot of audio files on a CD or on your portable MP3 player.
Here is a sample you can play right now, to get a feel for the quality: My dear fellow... (LQ).
High Quality MP3 File
The second version uses the MP3 format with variable bit-rate settings averaging out to 56Kbps. These files sound much better, but are much larger -- nearly four times larger than 16Kbps files.
Here is a sample of the high bandwidth MP3 file. The clip is the same as the one above: My dear fellow... (HQ).
Downloading our Recordings
Download links look like this:
HQ The HQ (or LQ) tells you whether it is a high quality or low quality recording. The number indicates how large the downloaded file is, where MB is short for megabytes (yes, these are very large files). Click on this link to start a download using your web browser.
Note: You may experience a short delay before the download starts. Our files are mirrored via New York University's Coral System. Their servers will take a moment to begin the download from our audio bank before they start sending data to you.
Transcripts
If you would like a copy of the text of a reading, click on the 
Transcript link.
Syndication
We've created two syndication feeds, one for regular RSS aggregators, and one for Podcasting. For more information on each, visit these links:
