> Yes exactly - why is this? I got myself a nice home cinema system but there's a lot of audio described content mixed in stereo only. Genuinely curious. Don't get me wrong I'm extremely grateful that these options are available for us but confused as to why a movie with 5.1 audio has the description track in stereo only. Maybe someone who works in the department would know....
Well, my best guess would be, that, at some point, there were made rules about how an audio description track should be. How low the volume of the actual movie or show should be during the narration and so on. At that time, 5.1 sound probably wasn’t such a big thing yet, so no one took it into consideration. When Netflix, and also recently Apple TV+ started doing audio description, 5.1 sound was already pretty common. So, I guess, for them it was just a normal thing, too have the audio description and 5.1.
I am not working in this department though. So, these are just wild guesses...