Like our health, we take our hearing for granted, except when something goes wrong. This is especially true with music, which is such powerful stuff that when we are experiencing it, we pay little attention to either the medium carrying it (sound) or the system through which we are experiencing it (our hearing). Usually, our perception of music is so solid, convincing and satisfying that the physics of the system disappear.

This gets us into trouble when we try recording. The sound of the music is quite palpable and solid when we listen to it, but after we record it and play it back, we often are quite disappointed with what we've lost. In even the best of cases, we notice that the music is different -- the playback doesn't sound the same as the original. The sounds we heard in the studio when we were setting up the microphones don't sound the same coming out of the loudspeaker.

If you read the advertising for recording equipment, you've probably noticed considerable hype about realistic and accurate sound reproduction. Microphone and loudspeaker manufacturers breathlessly extol the stunning realism of their particular products. Speaker manufacturers are often especially reckless, coming on about how their products reproduce exactly the sound that is on the tape (physically, of course, there is no sound on the tape, and there never was - only changing magnetic fields). So, accepting the premise of this hype as gospel, we often blame the differences that we hear on the equipment (as in, "This microphone sucks!" or "That console is just semipro junk!"). We've come to believe, from all this hype, designer audio stuff and tales from the studio, that we should be able to reasonably expect that the sound that comes out of the loudspeaker should be exactly the same as the sound that occurred in the studio. And so, we don't bother to ask a more basic question: is it possible to have the same sound come out of a loudspeaker that came out of the musical instrument?

The answer to this question is no, for a pair of reasons: first, the loudspeaker sounds different than the instrument it's mimicking, and second, the microphone doesn't hear the way our ears do!

Some other time, I'll talk about the loudspeaker problem (it's worth half-a-dozen articles, at least), but for now I want to concentrate on the input side of things in a very fundamental way: how we hear things as opposed to how microphones hear things. Once we begin to think in those terms, it gets a little easier to understand why sounds change when we record them, and what we can do to improve their realism and impact in a recording.