The sound was crisp, the picture clear.
No it wasn't. Flickering image that after a few runs of the through the projector was full of scratches. Optical audio going with the same.
Move to digital (audio first, picture more recently) has significantly improved the audiovisual quality.
The largest problem I have with movies and pretty much any media these days is the mixing. For a long time, actors came from theater background, they articulated their lines clearly and the dialogue was also usually mixed with higher volume than background music or sound effects.
These days actors talk with their natural voices while action scene is going on. Sound mix doesn't do any tricks to enhance the sound. It used to be that the dialogue came mostly out of center-front channel (because that's where actors are on screen), so I could compensate by setting my amplifier to put 3-6 dB extra out of center speaker. But now even that trick no longer works because the dialogue could come out from any channel.
And sometimes this comes out in editing too. Immediate cut from a quiet dialogue scene to an EXPLOSION that makes my ears pop.
So I'm just watching with closed captions on everything these days and keep the volume low. I read the dialogue lines and hear the big sound effects. It's actually almost like reading comics...