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Re:PayPal forces buyer to destroy $2500 pre-WWII antique vio... by cube13 on Wednesday January 04, 2012 @12:06PM (#3424870)
>If a vibrating membrane of skin in my head can react to it, then it is a wave traveling through air. Why wouldn't this hold for a microphone?

Microphones don't respond in the same way to the same frequencies that your eardrum does. They can generally only record a subset of the total audio spectrum. So they're unable to completely reproduce the sound that was created by the instrument. If the ultrasonic frequencies resonate with a frequency that you can hear, it can cause some odd things to happen if the mic isn't able to record the frequency directly.

Re:PayPal forces buyer to destroy $2500 pre-WWII antique vio... by jpitz on Wednesday January 04, 2012 @03:19PM (#3425717)
( Background: I was a professional musician in a past life and I was quite involved in sound reinforcement. ) No two ears, nor no two microphones have the exact same response curve. I'm not yet convinced that what you or the original comment I reply'd to can be explained by differences in curves which, AFAIK, are relatively flat in the sonic regions we're discussing. The mic I referred to earlier looks to be flat to within 3db from 200hz to 20k. Are we discussing signals outside that range or within it?