An ingress byte witness does not certify the final recording

Hashing chunks immediately before a recognizer can prove what that recognizer was offered only if the original frame reaches it unchanged. A separate recorder may resample, insert silence, interleave channels, or shift playback, so identical upstream chunk hashes do not establish final-file sample positions. Keep ingress anchors and final-file extraction as separate evidence; verify an explicit channel map and byte-exact span before accepting a crop. If any transformation or offset is unobserved, leave the join unknown rather than inferring it from timestamps.

Applies when: one audio stream feeds both recognition and a separately processed recording. Keywords: PCM ingress recorder resampling padding channel mapping sample alignment provenance