Question about how analog audio recording works

@mahgister , adaptation is the key to human survival.

What are you driving your headphones with? Triodes seem to be the thing now a days.

Yes we must adapt but without cooperation ( my wife and doctor) first no adaptation will be useful very long ... I admire Darwin not the neo- Darwinians... If i can tease you... 😉

i begins to drive them with my beloved Sansui Au-7700 which was driving my speakers with an organic almost tube-like sound but it is as you know  an S.S. design...

 The AU-7700 is one of the best Sansui but the K340 are not only hungry, but very picky and revelatory of noise more than my speakers was , and i discovered that what was acceptable from my speakers Mission Cyrus in my room was not acceptable by the AKG K340... Too high noise floor from the Sansui Au 7700...

I then swithch toward the top Sansui line the alpha series... i pay 300 bucks for this Sansui alpha AU 607-i ...

This one is not  as a tube-like sound but it sound more S.S. ,more cold than warm, from my speakers when i connected it to them  it sound the same from the K340... More cold but with my speakers i prefered the Au-7700 ...But it was i needed for the K340...

There exist better amplifier no doubt even if it was the best of Sansui in 1987...But my budget is very limited...

https://audio-database.com/SANSUI/amp/au-alpha607i-e.html

Anyway after 6 modifications inside and around the AKG K340 which takes me 6 months of listening experiments ( because i learned how this hybrid with passive grid of 5 resonators inside creating a dual acoustic chamber in the shell must work optimally i even read the Dr. Gorike patent to do it) ...  After my long process of optimization i was very satisfied by my soundfield 3-D filling the room as speakers did in many recordings...

This is the only successful hybrid in history and a complex design to figure out if we want to optimize it...

My dreamed amplifier is the Berning ZOTL tube amp , because of price, and because tubes in it  have a 10,000 hours life span and stay always cold as temperature of the room ... And the K340 need more a cold sound as in S.S. to my ears to shine  than a warm one to shine... And the tube amp of Berning sound more like S.S. with no harshness though... I never listen to it but i read all reviews..

I am completely satisfied now with the Sansui alpha... But i dream to try the ZOTL...It is not necessary... My actual system is better than my speakers/room on many acoustic factors because my Mission Cyrus so good they were for their price and they were good , lack deep bass and did not have the electro-static high frequencies i can enjoy now... And because of his inside grid of passive Helmholtz resonators able to fool the brain, i enjoy out of the head and speaker like realistic sound..

If i listen big organ , the organ is not in my head, the organ fill the roo0m and i feel it with my body and feet at 30 hertz by bone resonance... It is incredible and no headphones i own (9) would even compare... I dont use them... And now being no more  sad with the lost of my room and in better health,my house sold,  i came back here again...

By the way the atma-spehere tube amplifier is spectacularly beautiful and the reviews are unanimous for sound quality...Congratulations! But it is double the price of the ZOTL amplifier which i cannot afford anyway and i will never be able to pick one and the other for comparison...

But there is no frustation, my actual low cost system is anyway at 600 bucks the best i ever heard and i cannot fault it... i will keep my illusions and invest money in music... i did not bother myself with sound  anymore and the 3-D sound effect out of the head i was liking in my room is now around me again differently but not in a bad or worst way at all with this headphone...

My best to you...

Thanks for your kindness mijostyn ,

I was sometimes rude when we discussed in the past... I am too much passionnate and not so wise ...i am happy to be welcome by you... And i am happy to discuss with you even if we will differ of opinion in the future...but very opposite perspective are helpful to us and to all ..

I was sad and very busy selling my house then loosing my acoustic room depressed ... This impacted my health...I sell the house by force not by my own free will... My new house is smaller... No acoustic dedicated room... 😥

Then i decided to go back to headphone not so happily because my room was spectacular...and none of my headphones ( 9 ) ever pleased me except the last one i never optimized because of my room spectacular acoustic..

but i stumbled on this headphone not easy to figure out and i take 6 months of daily listenings experiments to modify and optimize it ( 6 modifications) ...Surprizingly , it goes under 30 hertz and then the soundfield i reach rival my speakers which stayed at 45 hertz or 50 at most...The AKG K340 is the top headphone of 1978 and is always top today ( modulo optimization) It is not an headphone i will advise to everybody bec ause you must be ready to open it and to created a DEDICATED system only fot it ...

I lost my "mechanized equalizer" 😁 but i used an electronic equalizer as you do yourself to optimize once for all the k340 my hybrid headphone...This k340 is the most difficult headphone and the most picky ever to drive and i even read the Dr. Gorike patent to figure it out how to optimize it ...

Then my house sold, my health coming back , my new audio system ready, i missed all people here and decided to go back...

I wish you with my heart the best possible for you and your family...

@mahgister , WELCOME BACK! I won’t ask where you have been, curiosity can be fatal.

For all purpose in life and for the average "us" the above post is enough... But to goes further the links i put are very illuminating about the complexities of this problem...

By the way in an audio system well put and under control, we "see" the sound in the room, our brain translate chords into imaginary perceived but very real dynamical VOLUME... It is like a rainbow perception a "real" illusion not a misperception, or an error or a meaningless accident but a phenomena at the frontier where the mind encounter the world and translate it from inside ...

My K340 headphone did this as well as my speakers in their acoustically controlled room did it , then sound is not only an abstraction created by the brain and the wacves, not only a felt vibrating string on a plane , nor a mere vibrating and oscillating surface, but a volume too and more...Acoustic and psycho-acoustic are so deep that even today there exist many unanswered problems about hearing ...

For example this articleabout decoding perception by the brain:

https://phys.org/news/2013-02-human-fourier-uncertainty-principle.html

Readers of the Bible know that the first sound play the first role in the creation in "Genesis and in ST-John where Logos is not an abstraction only but a "sound" and a "voice" ...As in Indian vedas the sound "OM" contains the universe... This is not only mere superstition but deep spiritual intuition about sound...And Sound contain information and memory as Babies listening the world decipher it way before seeing it... Etc.. Sound qualities are heard and convey many information about the fruit if we tap it to know if the fruit is ripe or not...We can deduce hearing his sound if the tapped object is made of steel or wood and if he contains aperture, one or many, and if the object is empty completely or dense etc... Sounds is information not a mere wave abstraction...Sound is quality not only quantity... But anyway numbers are qualities too as in Pythagoreanism and Platonism for example through their connection to shape and then qualitative symbolism by a primal Cenesthesia...

To answer this question mathemathically is very hard....Most of the question and some answers can be found in Marc Kac article," Hearing the shape of a drum" and there is an interesting and very deep confrence by Alain Connes, a true genius, founder of non commutative geometry...Keep his French name in your mind if you are a young student in physics or maths...

here the wiki stating the maths problem in two paragraphs: "the shape of a drum"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_the_shape_of_a_drum

Marc Kac article put the problem in front of your eyes:

https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~hunter/m207b/kac.pdf

Now deeper and life changing but very hard to figure out if you are not a physicist or a mathematician, Alain Connes go under the belly of this question and think about TIME and Information among other matter in this conference title "Seiing shapes" ... It is translated in English from the french original...Very deep...I must listen to it anew because it is very hard and i forgot it after few years...( i am a philosopher not a mathematician but maths is one of the key to philosophy for me)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z52ZAPrRbqE&t=232s