Help with ambient sound capture Mic

The spectral plots that many DAWs now can produce would be good ways to show the sound visually, but I'm not certain it would produce meaningful data. Analysing it would be very difficult. An old colleague - long retired from Vauxhall used to do this with probes. They were long rods with flat tops that you put to your ear, and the tip would be pressed to the engine block. They could hear the sound of bearings, tappet closures and push rod binding. I can't remember any of the other things he could diagnose. His hearing was good enough to be able to tell which cylinder was misfiring, which noise came from certain areas - stuff like that. I'd bet the big manufacturers are all using electronics and acoustic methods now, so maybe that's the area to look? We're at least two steps away with our conjecture. It makes sense, but we are perhaps reinventing the wheel.

This is way above my head, but B&K make precision testing kit - here's a paper.

https://www.bksv.com/media/doc/BO0340.pdf

They seem to have at least 12 microphones - reference microphones and array microphones??
 
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