Obligatory reminder to not eat things you harvest yourself unless you're 100% positive on ID. Join your local society if you want to learn!
Yeah, top two photos are oysters, and the bottom two are chants.
Based on the time of year and their appearance, I think the oysters were a native oyster variety, but your point still stands in the general case :).
I know you’re playing devil’s advocate, but to play devil:
In a theoretical world where you can manage to perfectly beamform the entire 20-20k Hz frequency range into a single node (or pair of nodes around the ears)… you’re still just re-condensing the original reference signal at the site of your beam target.
And if your idea of peak quality is to hear the reference signal loud and clear, it might be marginally easier to set up some well-tuned speakers in an arrangement relatively free of resonance hotspots and then crank up the volume.
So, how do you “crank up the volume” for that? Glad you asked; simple really: we need to apply a gain filter. To do this, we set up an array of batteries, and then connect only the positive side of the batteries to our audio cable. Positive electricity is bigger than negative electricity, so adding positive electricity to the cable means the speaker sound gets bigger.
In short, all you need to match the quality of a hi-fi beamforming speaker system can be replaced with a few 9V batteries connected to your tuner with a paperclip. Thanks for coming to my audio engineering TED talk.