The Masked Singer has long been plagued by suspicions that the much-touted ‘live vocals’ on the show are anything but, and now judge Jackie O has thrown fuel on the fire by confessing she didn’t hear what we all did when the show was broadcast weeks after filming.
Talking on her KIIS FM radio show with Kyle Sandilands, the host was asked why no one on the judging panel guessed the lion was Kate Ceberano, when the entire country knew immediately it was her.
WATCH: Masked Singer slammed for “underwhelming” Lion reveal
‘I will say this, everyone listening at home was guessing Kate Ceberano because you could hear Kate Ceberano, right, it was so obvious,’ Jackie admitted.
‘Watching on TV, I was like, “Oh my god that sounds exactly like Kate Ceberano, how did we not pick that up?”’
Jackie’s explanation is that the judges hear something very different in the studio to what is delivered in mixed and polished form to the broadcast audience.
‘We don’t hear what you hear,’ she casually admitted. ‘When you’re at that judging panel you’ve got the crowd, you’ve got so much going on, you don’t hear what you hear back home.’
While Jackie is seemingly blaming studio acoustics for the problem, her comments will only inflame popular theories that the audio track used in the broadcast version of the show are not the same as the ‘live’ vocal the performer delivers on the day.
The official stance from Channel 10 is that the artists behind the costumes are singing live, with vocals picked up on mics inside their masks, and not necessarily the hand mics they use for the cameras.
But some fans aren’t entirely convinced, with many taking to Twitter to voice their suspicions that the broadcast version of the audio may have been recorded ‘as live’ at a different time to the performance we see, or that the audio is otherwise somehow altered.
‘So im confused – how is this live?’ wrote one user, followed by another, who said, ‘Hey #MaskedSingerAU, why give mics when they’re masked, they’re surely not singing live then?!’
Others were more disgruntled at the possibility of The Masked Singer being a farce.
‘Everyone knows that no one in singing live on this sh*t right? Literally the worst show on TV,’ said one user.
However, judge Jackie O Henderson is adamant that they are singing live.
‘I’ve seen a set malfunction happen and something fell on one of the singers and the singing stopped straight away,’ Jackie told The Advertiser. ‘They are singing live – 100 per cent fact.’
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