Tim Smith makes some really good points in his post (although I disagree about my completely misunderstanding how acoustic recording/playback works – actually, I think I DO understand it).

Anyway, in this article I was comparing the ear to the microphone to illuminate various things about each of them, and also to show some places where we typically get confused. Tim isn't confused – he's got a really good handle on it.

The problems he doesn't get to have to do with where errors accrue in the capture of information at the microphone. We lose a lot there. Take a look at:

www.moultonlabs.com/weblog/more/we_want_really_accurate_recordings

Anyway, thanks, Tim, for an excellent and thoughtful post.

Best regards,

Dave

Without spending a lot of time on this, there IS other research suggesting how single-ear localization happens. Further, I was startled by how robust I found that localization to be, even subject to its limitations. I'm not able to comment on mindbreaker's personal experience. My experience remains anecdotal, but easily, if fuzzily, repeatable. Thanks for writing, mindbreaker!

mindbreaker is quite right; this article shows a complete misunderstanding of the way the acoustic recording/playback system works.

We would want the microphone to be similar to the ear if we were going to bypass the ear of the listener and insert electric signals directly into his nervous system, but this is, of course, not what we intend.

The role of the microphone is to capture information that is 'encoded' in air pressure fluctuations and convert it into a forma that can be stored. The loudspeaker is then called upon to convert this information back into its original form. Of course, there are many problems with this system, mostly at the loudspeaker end, but what matters at the microphone end is the completeness of the information-capture, not the exact mechanism.

Suppose, in an analogous case, that we take a page of handwriting, scan it into a computer, and then print it back into a new but almost identical page. It makes no difference that the scanner works in a totally different way from that in which the eye does, we just want it to capture as much information as possible.

The article seems to miss that whether a mic/speaker or direct sound is emanating, the ear is going to be used and all its cool features and the brain processes inherent in that, unless we are talking about robots enjoying music. The comparison should instead be the sound that enters the ear in each instance. You would not want a mic to do the processing the ear does because the processing would be doubled with, no doubt, strange results.
Also, even though light moves faster than sound the brain take more, not less time to process vision. Watching the other musician instead of listening is probably not the best choice unless you can perceive the changes more clearly with vision than sound.
I also seriously doubt that we can tell what direction sound is coming from with one ear other than by moving our heads or already knowing how loud a sound should be if we were aimed at it optimally.
I have some hearing loss in one ear. If I put a hearing plug that ear, that mutes it by an additional 33DB, I am pretty close to deaf in that ear in that situation (which I have to do some times because the muscle he was talking about goes nuts sometimes). When that is the case I truly can't tell what direction sound is coming from with my good ear. My guess is that you are picking up some small bit of sound in the covered ear that is providing you with its direction. One ear direction I say is a total myth. Memory of a sound as it changes typically going around ones head may give cues we pick up, but if there is no relative movement history of the sound, I say I highly doubt any direction can be discerned.

These articles are amazing, genius.... i can't wait to read all of them and then re-read all of them again... - Christopher