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Reply	Phil says: My thoughts are that when you are sitting at the dinner table you receive additional information from your eyes, and both your ears that helps your brain realize where relevant noises are coming from. When you are listening to the tape your brain is focused on all the noises coming out of the recorder.  (no votes) Tags: animals, transport, human body.
	posted on 2008-06-11 22:37:00 | Report abuse

Reply	Brian says: My thoguhts are along the lines of the physical properties of the equipment used to record the sounds itself.Most microphones for use at home are very small which suggests that they would resonate at higher frequency than larger mics. Therefore I put forward the theory that the high frequency sounds of plates and utensils crashing around create higher amplitude modulations in the equipment and hence are recorded "louder" than human speech.A low pass filter fitted between the tape and speakers should help to mitigate this problem.  (no votes) Tags: animals, transport, human body.
	posted on 2008-06-12 13:04:00 | Report abuse

Reply	whipster says: I think that the comment above does have some good points, however I think that the real reason it's difficult to focus on particular voices from recordings is that in the normal environment you have stereo hearing, which allows your brain to work out where the voice is coming from and concentrate on it. However recording with a device like a microphone means that the information is no longer stereo - therefore making it difficult to decipher voice from background noise.If you were to do recordings with two microphones, separated by the same distance as the human ears, and panned both tracks to the left and right respectively, then you would find it almost feels as if you were there...Try looking for virtual hair cut (on google), and listening to it through headphones to see what I mean.. remember to put the headphones in the correct ears!  (no votes) Tags: human body, plants.
	posted on 2008-06-12 16:44:00 | Report abuse

Reply	will says: All of the above responses are good, but they seem to be dancing around the point. Consider our eyes, they interpret light unlike photographic film. Our eyes use contrast-thresholds to give us our sense of relative brightness, white balance, and even depth perception. Cameras must be adjusted to give us an approximation of what our eyes see.In the same way our ears hear all sounds in relation to the relative loudness of other sounds, tape recorders do not. Tape recorders are especially notorious for low quality signal-to-noise ratios (the hiss between sounds), and therefore will interpret all sounds quite different then your ear.Hope this helps...  (no votes) Tags: human body, plants.
	posted on 2008-06-13 03:23:00 | Report abuse

Reply	Anonymous says: Most cheap tape recorders possess microphones that use compression to a high degree.Compression pulls up the noise floor by reducing the loud noises (speech being the nearest sound source) and amplifying the lowest volume sounds to make everything a similar volume level....thats what compressors do I'm afraid.  (no votes) Tags: human body, plants.
	posted on 2008-06-13 11:31:00 | Report abuse

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