Breaking the Silence

In 1986, a group of men in Australia began praying for a way to reach billions of people who were unable to read God's Word for themselves. One of those praying Australians was a Bible Society leader named Tom Treseder. Tom's dream was to find a way to play back the entire Bible on a reliable audio device with no moving parts - one that would not be subject to incessant mechanical breakdowns.

The MP3 player would not be invented for another ten years, so the limits of known technology would have to be pushed to create the world's first digital audio Bible. Undaunted, Tom sketched the initial drawing of an Audio Bible.

In 1988, God brought Tom together with Ken Crowell, an American Christian electronics engineer. At the time, Ken and his wife Margie were busy building their electronics business from the ground up. The Crowells were already in the process of developing a fixed tuned radio for missions work together with Canadian, Allan McGuirl, and American, Harold Kent. Truly, God was forming a global team for His purposes.

The Crowells and the Treseders shared a passion for the Bible and envisioned billions of non-readers hearing God's Word in their own language. Their objective was to record and play back a digital version of the entire Bible, an incredible eighty hours of audio. Considering that the memory capacity of technology at the time was about 30 seconds, the team definitely had a mountain to move.

Overcoming daunting technological challenges, Ken and his development team finally brought the audio capacity of the prototype player up to 15 minutes, then extended it to 30, then 60 minutes and beyond. Today, the MegaVoice digital audio Bible is a reality and the Crowells and Treseders give glory to God saying, "It is the Lord's doing and it is marvelous in our eyes."