I’m still chugging along doing maintenance but yeah it’s getting ridiculous. Just as a metric: service manual length.
My motorcycles: ~800 pages
My 2010: ~1800 pages
My 2016: ~13500 pages
I fear to see a more modern vehicle. I don’t own anything newer.
A lot of the page increase is all the diagnostic code debugging. Modern vehicles have way too many computers.
The police station in our town has a designated area for stuff like this. It’s lit and recorded 24/7. The police station itself is also open 24/7 for obvious reasons. It also shares the parking lot with city hall and a courthouse. Absolutely an American thing.
Depending on how far back you go a lot of those movies were only recorded in stereo and sometimes even mono. So the mixing was pretty straight forward. Surround sound and pulling the bulk of voices to the center channel is a large part of this problem. Then you’re kind of at the mercy of your device as to how well it down mixes surround down to stereo. Some are pretty decent, and others are pretty terrible. Now things like DTS:X and Dolby Atmos that have 11+ channels I’d expect this issue is only worse(these still fallback to 5.1 surround if not supported).
I have a 13 speakers Atmos setup sitting in my living room and this isn’t even remotely an issue. That’s absolute overkill for people that aren’t very into home theater though. As it’s an expense for sure.
I will mention there is a rare movie (I own about 4 thousand titles) that I need to adjust the center channel volume but it’s like maybe 1:250 movies. So sometimes the mix does just suck. I don’t really watch streaming so that might be its own can of worms for audio.
I disconnected my Echo devices when Amazon Sidewalk was rolling out. I’m not even sure what Alexa Plus even is. I was back at my parent’s house for the holidays and they still have Echo devices. Mine never just randomly started announcing stuff but oh man they do now. Like I’m just sitting there reading a book in a dead silent room and it scares the crap out of me just prattling on.
When one starts to annoy me when I’m in my living room I shut off the lights in the house and open the door to the garage and turn the lights on in there. Usually less than a minute before they fly out of the dark house and into the bright garage. Same can be done with porch lights and the such if you have an apartment.
I was seriously considering a FiST(Fiesta ST) until I learned that the new generation wasn’t going to come to the US. They sold the first Gen for a couple more years before killing it off even though the 2nd gen’s were available in Europe the whole time. Blamed it on ‘lack of interest’ Well yeah, you make a better version and you aren’t given it to us. Why would I buy the old one?…at no discount.