Eli5 Why does sound ‘sound’ different e.g. in a room through a microphone compared to my ears?

Question

Eli5 Why does sound ‘sound’ different e.g. in a room through a microphone compared to my ears?

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Answer 1

Microphones don’t exactly reproduce the sounds of an environment, they are better at registering sound of specific frequencies than others [example](https://images.app.goo.gl/1W64MScKqJ535W3u7) of an sm58’s frequency response. If you look at that you’ll notice that sounds < 150 hz are picked up at a lower db than sounds around 1000 hz. The boxyness and other audio artifacts are introduced because the mic is reproducing what it heard, not whatever the sound recorded actually was.