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Maybe I'm stupid, but why is this tech needed now? Whenever I watch movies (new to me) if they're from before ~2005 I never need subtitles to understand, never mind genre or origin... and if they're more recent I frequently do. It's cool to have tools that highlight this for folks in industry, but how were they getting it right before that?

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I think the complexity of audio has out stripped quality of speaker systems.

My guest room has a cheap 40inch TV the audio is terrible compared to the visual output. And I can play what feels like cinema quality 7.1 audio and 4K video over it. The result is the audio is terrible, tiny distorted. Muddy. Hard to understand if it's anything other than a voice over.

In 2005 the quality of whatever I was watching was crap but it was mixed knowing that it was likely going to be viewed that way!

That's been my conclusion admittedly based on not much.

I think a big key is channel management. You wouldn't buy significantly cheaper smaller audience content because it had to be big enough audience for the time it was blocking.

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