  We show that the measurement of di-leptons might provide only a restricted
view into the most dense stages of heavy ion reactions. Thus, possible studies
of meson and baryon properties at high baryon densities, as e.g. done at
GSI-HADES and envisioned for FAIR-CBM, might observe weaker effects than
currently expected in certain approaches. We argue that the strong absorption
of resonances in the high baryon density region of the heavy ion collision
masks information from the early hot and dense phase due to a strong increase
of the total decay width because of collisional broadening. To obtain
additional information, we also compare the currently used approaches to
extract di-leptons from transport simulations - i.e. shining, only vector
mesons from final baryon resonance decays and instant emission of di-leptons
and find a strong sensitivity on the method employed in particular at FAIR and
SPS energies. It is shown explicitly that a restriction to rho meson (and
therefore di-lepton) production only in final state baryon resonance decays
provide a strong bias towards rather low baryon densities. The results
presented are obtained from UrQMD v2.3 calculations using the standard set-up.
