A Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) AP-3C Orion returns to RAAF Pearce airbase from a search for Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 over the southern Indian Ocean, March 26, 2014. REUTERS/Jason Reed Voice experts believe the audio recordings from missing Malaysia jet 370 were edited, according to Elizabeth Chuck of NBC News.

At least two different audio sources recorded the tapes, the experts concluded, and one of those recordings may have been a digital recorder held up to a speaker.

The recordings were published for the first time on Thursday, and analysts who listened to the recordings told NBC that they noticed at least four clear breaks in the audio that indicated edits.

"It's very strange," audio-video forensic expert Ed Primeau of Primeau Forensics told NBC. "At approximately 1:14 ... it sounds like someone is holding a digital recorder up to a speaker, so it's a microphone-to-speaker transfer of that information. That's a pretty big deal because it raises the first red flag about there possibly being some editing."

Primeau and forensic audio examiner Kent Gibson detailed several other irregularities.

Gibson said that the tapes indicated that "Malaysian authorities or whoever presented this made edits for whatever reason." He added that "it's not the way to handle evidence," but it also doesn't necessarily imply anything about the investigation.

"Unfortunately, there are no smoking guns, except there are edits. And there are clear edits," Gibson told NBC.

At 1:30 a.m. on March 8, the plane carrying 239 people dropped off air-traffic-control screens, less than an hour into a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. No one knows where it went after that. Investigators think it's somewhere off the west coast of Australia.



