[SilasX]

Probably not, or they don't go by it, since there seems to be a massive problem with people being unable to hear dialogue well enough to not need subtitles.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37218711

It was a real eye(ear?)-opener to watch Seinfeld on Netflix and suddenly have no problem understanding what they're saying. They solved the problem before, they just ... unsolved it.

[olyjohn]

My favorite thing about Kodi is an audio setting that boosts the center channel. Since most speech comes through that, it generally just turns up the voices, and the music and sound effects stay at the same level. It's a godsend. Also another great reason to have a nice backup collection on a hard drive.

[estebank]

It's a similar thing to watching movies from before the mid-2000 (I place the inflection point around Collateral in 2004) where after that you get overly dark scenes where you can't make out anything, while anything earlier you get these night scenes where you can clearly make out the setting, and the focused actors/props are clearly visible.

Watch An American Werewolf in London, Strange Days, True Lies, Blade Runner, or any other movie from the film era all up to the start of digital, and you can see that the sets are incredibly well lit. On film they couldn't afford to reshoot and didn't have immediate view of what everything in the frame resulted on, so they had to be conservative. They didn't have per-pixel brightness manipulation (feathering and burning were film techniques that could technically have been applied per frame, but good luck with doing that at any reasonable expense or amount of time). They didn't have hyper-fast color film-stock they could use (ISO 800 was about the fastest you could get), and it was a clear downgrade from anything slower.

The advent of digital film-making when sensors reached ISO 1600/3200 with reasonable image quality is when the allure of time/cost savings of not lighting heavily for every scene showed its ugly head, and by the 2020's you get the "Netflix look" from studios optimizing for "the cheapest possible thing we can get out the door" (the most expensive thing in any production is filming in location, a producer will want to squeeze every minute of that away, with the smallest crew they could get away with).