[tacos]

These broad generalizations about psychoacoustics are simply not accurate. It sounds like what every novice engineer experiences before honing his or her craft. If you're surprised by what you hear after recording something, either you weren't listening properly while recording it, you haven't learned how to record it properly yet, or your recording/listening environment itself is flawed.

Of course we notice different things about an object after taking a picture of it. But you've got to be very careful about cause/effect/bias.

[b1daly]

I've been a professional recording engineer for 20 years. The phenomena I'm discussing is an objectively true, subjective perceptual effect, it doesn't change based on how long you've been recording. Over time you learn to expect it, but it doesn't go away. A lot of audio engineering involves working around the heavy real time signal processing our brain is always doing.

That's interesting about animals. It seems likely that their auditory systems would be tuned for the type of stimuli that are vital for their survival. There would be a lot of overlap, but since it's hard to tell their subjective experience, it would take some clever testing to see how their perception of recorded sound would differ.