Missing information

I am always fascinated to watch those slow-speed nature videos where you watch flowers open and plants grow. Or, the opposite. A high-speed camera that slows down the wing motions of a hummingbird so we might see what in real life we cannot. Those cameras (both film and video) are essentially digital: frame by frame they capture a single moment in time. When played back they look continuous. Each form of slow and fast digital capture offers a glimpse into that which our analog senses cannot perceive. In other words, we get more information than what we are able to consume in our analog world. The same is true today in digital audio. Whether high-sample rate PCM or DSD, modern A/D D/A converters can capture and playback far more details and frequency extremes than we can perceive. All of which to point out that somewhere along the technology timeline we moved from being able to seamlessly capture nearly all the information in a live performance (the end of the analog era) to today capturing more than our human auditory systems can use. Now that it is no longer a question about missing data, the challenge becomes converting that data back into the analog world.