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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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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