Compensating for that takes a lot of skill and ingenuity ... I suspect a really top-notch recorder player like Michaela Petri is constantly adjusting her playing technique on the fly to produce the best tone for each situation.
I take your point, but it still seems to me to be a situation where MP is able to compensate for situations that would cause degradation of her tone quality (forked notes etc) and thus maintain a standard that I can't attain even in the most ideal circumstances. If you take one of the recorder's "good" notes, say something like lower G on a tenor, and you're not aiming for anything other than standard volume, then most of the "distractions" are absent and you could concentrate on getting the best tone quality you possibly can. With a recorder, there doesn't seem to be much that can be done, yet MP still gets a better tone than I do.
So, since she says relax throat and mouth, I infer that changes in the shape of your throat and mouth are supposed to affect tone.
Do you do that on the clarinet too, OAG?
Yes, you can change the way you are blowing, and change the sound. And I take the point about being relaxed but believe me, I am a pretty relaxed player - any more relaxed and I'd fall asleep.
It all seems like one of those mystery wrapped in an enigma situations. There is that ongoing debate about whether the type of wood makes a difference to the sound, and there are standard tropes along the lines of "harder woods give a clearer and more projecting sound" that I'm not sure I believe at all. There is a Sarah Jefferey video on which she tries a whole lot of alto recorders (sent to her by EMS I think) and she gets quite excited about the tonal differences between them which, quite honestly, I can't hear. Maybe that's just my ears, yet I can hear that MP gets a tone I can hardly aspire to. I feel that the way a recorder is made should mean that it could be played mechanically via an air pump that produced an optimised air stream that always gave the best tone, but it probably wouldn't. So what is it that she is doing???