Why Can A Mic Record Most Audio That Sounds Exactly As I Hear It, But When It Records Music From A Speaker, That Sounds Different?
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Because the microphone is NOT recording everything EXACTLY as you hear it, the playback system does not playback everything EXACTLY as the microphone recorded it, and your ear does not hear things exactly like your microphone.
The sound sources and the room also play a huge part. The microphone is capturing the sound arriving at one specific point in the room. So unless the microphone is is right at your ear, then the sound is traveling a different distance and bouncing off of walls it never did in the recording. It’s a completely different environment.
Everytime you run some sort of an analog signal through a system it becomes a little more distorted. This is why when you record a recording of a recording of a recording it sounds so bad.
Perhaps a better question is: how can the get the sound to sound as similar as they do given all the difficulties in doing so?
If you listen to say, a band performance in any old room, you’re not just hearing the sound coming directly from the band. You’re also hearing all the echoes of the band reverberating off the walls of the room.
If you record that sound with a perfect microphone near your head, then play it back through perfect speakers also very close to your head via, say, headphones, it should sound just like it did standing there live. Put on a convincing VR headset and it’d feel like you were really there.
Play that recording from a floor speaker across a room, though, and it sounds… *off*. You’re presumably in a completely different room than you were in before. So all the little reverberations the mic recording picked up will be re-reverberated through the new room, which will make it sound odd.
Even if you had a “pure” studio recording of the band performance, if you played it through a speaker and then tried to record that speaker with a mic, the mic is no longer just picking up the speaker, it’s picking up the room reverberations, too. The mic is recording what *that* specific speaker sounds like at *that* specific spot in *that* specific room. So the mic recording will come out sounding markedly different from the original.
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