Questions about Resolving Systems

I’ve been thinking about the word "resolving" and had a visual experience that inspired me. I was sitting at a stop light with a freight truck in front of me. It had a round tail light composed of an array of little red LEDs in what looked like an even pattern. I peered over my glasses and saw the LED array out of focus and noticed something I could not easily detect when they were in focus - they were not evenly spaced apart, but were grouped into sub arrays that created a flower petal effect. The blurry vision revealed the subtle spacing differences that were harder to see with sharper focus, which just made all the spaces look relatively large compared to the size of each LED element.

I created the attached image to try to demonstrate the effect. I’m not sure how exactly this applies to audio but I suspect it does. Some systems may reveal things that weren’t intended to be revealed while simultaneously obscuring things that should be revealed.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/J7vD8TfarsK8Y3Qs6

By sacrificing the contrast of each individual dot by adding a blurry halo around it I'm simultaneously adding an increased contrast of the distance between the dots.

@hilde45 

Thanks for the links. The uncanny is an interesting topic. The term gets applied to CGI graphics, which can be simultaneously impressive and disappointing. I'll admit I didn't see the connection to my post at first, but the idea that something is so right in some ways but so wrong in others I think is on point. CGI graphics come to mind because they allow portrayals of people and animals that can do thing that no Muppet could ever do, and yet they don't move quite right and so it's really weird - really bad sometimes. I'll take the Muppet because it fails more broadly and evenly and better allows me to suspend my disbelief. The ways it does move are perfectly in alignment with real physics and real human motion of the Muppeteer. 

@hilde45 

I'm coming around to that realization more and more, that ultimate realism isn't a realistic goal, but there are certain presentations that come across as enjoyable and appropriate, as you say they make me feel at home. I've run in to paradoxes where I can clearly say that one speaker sounds better in most ways than another, but I actually prefer to use the lesser speaker because I can adjust to its faults better. 

What we need is a system that reveals all the good characteristics of good recordings, but then detects bad recordings and "fixes them up."