When photography in the 1940s got to the point of technological progress where films could capture the smallest of details, actors and actresses freaked out.
Suddenly, every wrinkle, wart, and skin blemish was not only visible but magnified on huge screens in front of large audiences. Makeup helped, but at some point, it just wasn't enough to aswage the movie star's vanity.
That's the point where they began smearing Vaseline jelly on glass filters in front of the camera's lens, reducing the clarity that optics engineers had worked so hard to achieve.
Move forward a number of decades to today, where we find a similar situation where audio resolutions are so high as to frighten musicians.
Just the other day at Octave Studios, while playing back a recording, the musicians who made the music were horrified at the clarity. They felt undressed. Naked. Every detail was exposed and laid bare.
This exemplifies the revealing system problem where every nuance and subtlety in the music is exposed for better or worse. For most of us, it's for the better. We hear every last detail in the music. It's what we worked hard to achieve by means of better electronics and loudspeakers.
Few among us want to smear even the tiniest bit of Vaseline over the lens of musical detail we've worked so hard to achieve, yet it's perhaps useful to remember not everyone is interested in laying bare all music, warts and all.
