The last sentence is what I have done and it works for me for the most part.
The first part of your post is where I was going with the close mic'ed speaker with a mass of mic's covering the speaker surface... as that is where the sound is originating from to begin with. You get a snap shot of the entire speaker up close. As the sound is reproduced with an FR speaker and propagates, the room reflections will combine with the close mic sound to give a full representation of the speaker as if it were the actual speaker in the cab in the room, At least this sounded good when I was typing it up :lol.
Or how about this, Maybe a new type of mic needs to be developed that can listen to the entire speaker surface as one mic at a given distance :?. What do ya think is it possible would it make a difference or is that to science fiction for it to actually work?
I know where you're coming from but this will probably never be the case.
Acoustic interference is far less 'perfect' than analogue or digital in the box simulated interference. Logically it should work, but the subtleties of the interference of the
exact space currently being played in need to be factored in for the perfect 'in the room' feel.
Regarding a mic being developed, that presents a whole host of related problems. For starters, a mic diaphragm captures a certain place in the acoustic space. A diaphragm doesn't capture the entire surface of it to the same degree. For example, waves hitting the edge of the diaphram have far less of an effect than the centre. Now this isn't so much of a problem where the field is stable, such as in the far field, but in the near field where the acoustic differences are distinct from mm to mm, a 1 inch diaphragm is a best guess, tbh. If we develop a mic with a larger diaphragm, the mass will be too much to capture high frequencies efficiently. Remember, the principle behind a diaphragm is essentially a speaker cone in reverse (yes, this includes ribbons), and we know how inefficient they are in transduction. So, we need a mic with a zero mass diaphragm and a surface area wide enough to capture the entire area for it to be entirely accurate. I'm interested in the development of graphene speakers for a similar reason, because the less mass you have, the less energy lost.
Another idea is that you could generate a massless field (or close to, such as an electromagnetic field or similar....) to pick up the vibration of the air molecules, but tbh, we're in Star Trek territory with that one, and good old Heisenberg (the first, not the meth cooking one
) had a couple of things to say regarding particle detection and accuracy.
IMO it is a bit of a pointless exercise. We can't expect a speaker to sound the same from room to room just the same as we cannot expect our voices to sound the same from one environment to another. When we record in different spaces, we don't expect to be exactly the same. It's just that the amount of options and tools in the Axe means that we
expect to be able to do it. We need to learn that we cannot, and to live with what the Axe
can do, which surpasses any guitar tool that I know of.
In a related note, there was a study done (I'll find references for anyone interested) which found that the less options people had, the happier they were. This, I think, is a case of dissatisfaction (mild, it must be said) arising from the sheer amount of options on offer.
