Introduction
Unity can play, mix, stream, spatialize, schedule, and profile audio without third-party middleware. Many small and medium projects can ship with AudioSource, Audio Mixer, Audio Random Container, and modest supporting code.
Larger productions still adopt CRI ADX, Wwise, or FMOD Studio. The reason is usually not lower sound quality or automatically better performance. The practical boundary is this:
Can the game keep treating audio as clips triggered by code, or must audio behavior become independently authored data that sound designers can edit, package, profile, and validate?
Beyond that boundary, Unity can reproduce many features, but the team must maintain event definitions, parameter mapping, voice policy, content delivery, live tuning, validation, and diagnostics.
