It makes me laugh as audiophiles prattle on about recording unless they were recording engineers themselves.
Engineers may attempt to get what’s on the other side of the glass into the recording. And almost always certainly must fail. And as often as not the recording is a creation in its own right assembled from tracks recorded on different days, often in different rooms, possibly on different continents.
No engineer anywhere ever heard in the booth what was actually playing in the studio. Not even when nothing is playing. The studio has an ambience which is masked by booth equipment self-noise and air-con. Acoustically they can be worlds apart due to volume, shape, contents and surface treatment.
One of Al Schmidt’s masterpieces is Toto IV. The iconic track ’Africa’ began as a four bar drum segment cut from hours of recordings, spliced end to end and then looped. Everything else is layered on top over many months. I still get goosebumps today when I recall when Jeff brought a cassette of the finished song to a date and played it for the cats. We were speechless. Drum perfection!