Question by Billy188: Live sound and the sound system?
Is there a difference between a live sound, whether it be a human voice or a car, and a recorded sound played through loud speakers? More specifically, are there any tangible scientifically distinguishable elements between the two?
Best answer:
Answer by Dvandom
Any speaker is going to have a limited range of frequencies it produces. Really good speakers cover the entire range that the human ear can pick up, and a little extra just in case. But most real sounds have bits and pieces that go outside our range of hearing, even the human voice.
So, if you analyze the full range of frequencies on a sound, you can generally tell if it cuts off at a certain limit, marking it as a recording. However, your analyzer has to have a broader range than the speakers, so it becomes a sort of arms race between the person faking the sound and the person trying to detect the fake.
If you’re doing this for a plot point in a story, you don’t really need to worry about the arms race aspect unless the person doing the faking expects to have to fool computer analysis. If they only expect to have to fool the human ear, odds are the speakers won’t go much past audible range.
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