What critical flaw plagued early synchronization efforts like the Kinetophone?
Answer
Manual starting causing discrepancies when film speed varied
Early devices like the Kinetophone, which often involved Thomas Edison's work, required projectionists to manually initiate the phonograph cylinder and the picture projector at the same time. Since there was no inherent physical lock between the two separate mechanical devices, any minor variation in how fast or slow the film ran compared to the rotational speed of the disk resulted in obvious and immediate discrepancies between the sound and the image. This inherent lack of control underscored the technical requirement that audio information needed to be physically locked to the image frame to achieve reliable results.
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