Plantronics headset to blame for Neil Armstrong's moon gaffe?

A closer read of the press release for Plantronics new rugged Bluetooth headset throws up an interesting choice on the part of the company's marketing department. The release claims that Neil Armstong's first words on the moon were carried using a Plantronics head-set (not clear if he was wearing one or it was at mission control?)

Unfortunately the version of that line that Plantronics have included on its press release is believed to be the wrong one in some circles.

Space geeks will tell you that the oft-repeated line of “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” (quoted by Plantronics) is not what he said, as if you stop to think about it, man and mankind are the same thing. The line makes sense with an ‘a’ inserted: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”.

There has been a lot of hullabaloo about this, with even Armstrong seemingly unsure what he might have said, but this sentence from Wikipedia makes it clear that Armstrong’s quote might not be the best one for a company looking to show off the ability of their technology to transmit clearly and cleanly (although I guess we should cut them some slack as it was the Moon rather than say Oxford Street).

“It has since been claimed that acoustic analysis of the recording reveals the presence of the missing "a" A digital audio analysis conducted by Peter Shann Ford, an Australia-based computer programmer, claims that Armstrong did, in fact, say "a man", but the "a" was inaudible due to the limitations of communications technology of the time.”