A vinyl record is a copy of a musical recording. How can a series of grooves or channels cut into a peice of vinly medium reproduce different instruments and sounds precisely to our ears? Apologies if this is this more of a medical question or sound engineering question. I understand how the music is cut and transferred to a vinyl medium but how do we know it’s a piano vs a distorted guitar? How can these primative grooves hold such information or does every soundwave hold that specific information? A digital stream or even a cassette tape makes more sense than how a vinly disc plays back music of different genres.
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Every sound is just a series of pressure waves in air. If you pluck a guitar string or tap the key of a piano it will just make a sequence of vibrations in the air, and that is what the grooves in the record are storing. Our ability to distinguish the kind of instrument comes down to the complexity and differences in those sound waves.
Remember that air can only be one pressure at any given point and time. Each of your ears only contains one eardrum which can only be in one place at a time. One groove then, tracked by one needle, can in principle record any sound you are capable of hearing.
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