SNES vs. Genesis audio

[blargg]

The SNES equivalent of removing the low-pass filter from a Genesis would be using a different interpolation scheme in the SPC-700, as some SPC players do. The BRR sample encoding scheme also employs a low-pass filter, so you might adjust that as well. This of course can't make up for the samples themselves lacking higher frequency content. Put another way, even a radically-enhanced SPC-700 couldn't deliver much cripser sound, while a radically-enhanced YM2612 could, because the FM parameters are essentially analog.

[tepples]

(eg, The entirety of the cast in Starfox is made from the one "Wing Damaged" sample)

That's a freaking awesome bit of trivia.

So I guess Falco is really saying "wing wing wing damage" and not "bwe bwe bwe jammin" like I always imagined.

"Damage" explains why Falco and Fox sound like they're saying a so-called bad word. I heard "God dammit da-dammit da-damn" when I first played it.

[UncleSporky]

(eg, The entirety of the cast in Starfox is made from the one "Wing Damaged" sample)

That's a freaking awesome bit of trivia.

So I guess Falco is really saying "wing wing wing damage" and not "bwe bwe bwe jammin" like I always imagined.

"Damage" explains why Falco and Fox sound like they're saying a so-called bad word. I heard "God dammit da-dammit da-damn" when I first played it.

Although this sort of language is understandable when you have a wingman like Slippy.

[TmEE]

IMO, the post DAC hardware in the SNES isn't the best. There is a relatively simple mod (compared to some other mods I have seen) for the SNES to output a digital S/PDIF signal. Can't get any cleaner than that. I'l try and get some recordings done if anybody's interested.

The post DAC HW is not bad at all in the separate SPC machines. SPDIF mod does not get rid of the interpolation which is one of the biggest reasons for muffled sound, SPDIF gets rid of the negligable analog filtering effects, but difital filtering andi nterpolation effects still remain, which I consider unwanted (and you want it to be present).

From what I have seen while my idle browsing through the C64 HVSC, on average the entirety of a games audio is stored in ~8Kb at any one time. Thats driver, music, instruments and sometimes even SFX routines. I dare say that similar music drivers on the SPC700 take about the same space and considering the BRR compression the DSP uses for it's sample data there is a decent amount a space left for sample data. And let's not forget that it is just as easy to bend samples to one's will as it is a FM synth (eg, The entirety of the cast in Starfox is made from the one "Wing Damaged" sample)

My MD sound system has its sound engine take up all the 8KB of RAM the Z80 has, with 4KB for 128 instruments and 28KB of 112 sound effects, then there's up to 514KB of music data per music file and up to 16MBytes of samples (due to 24bit addressing). This is all designed to work around MD setup, it cannot be made working on SNES or some other setup without major cutting back.

They don't sound to bad but theres too much aliasing (is that the right word?). The Amiga potentially has far superior PCM capabilities compared to the MegaCD (not accounting for raw storage space), but nearly all Amiga music I listen to has the machine's internal audio filter turned ON to avoid what I hear in your recordings which sound crisp yes, but IMO, not as clean as I prefer.

This is aliasing and it is exactly what I want ot be heard by removign the filters. I killed absolutely all filtering in my Amiga CD32 and it sounds great now, you would say not that great. Crisp and aliased > "clean" and muffled for me. I hate filtering, if I want it, I just push in a button on my amp (which I never do )

[Bregalad]

I don't see why interpolation wouldn't be desirable. You can disable interpolation in some players, and you can see how bad it sounds without it. This basically create "staircase waveforms" on samples, and sounds bad. The only samples that'd sound better without it is on saw waves and square waves.

Maybe Cubic or Sine interpolation is better than Gaussian though if that is what you mean. It outputs better treble. But if you want higer frequencies to sound good the only way is to use a higher sample rate = more memory.

[Hojo_Norem]

This is aliasing and it is exactly what I want ot be heard by removign the filters. I killed absolutely all filtering in my Amiga CD32 and it sounds great now, you would say not that great. Crisp and aliased > "clean" and muffled for me. I hate filtering, if I want it, I just push in a button on my amp (which I never do )

Speaking of amps, rather than putting a lot of effort into removing filters, why don't you just turn up the treble / high freq eq on your amp? It won't go high enough? Then just add an external graphic equaliser separate and bump up the high freqs on that.

My point about the Amiga is that unlike most other machines, the filter on the Amiga is completely optional and can be disabled and enabled in software. By forcing the filters off the quality of certain types of sounds are degraded (more on this below) along with, more importantly, the composer's original vision.

Turning filters off degrades sound quality you here me say? Lets take StarWing for example, a decent mix of both electronic band style music and classical orchestral music. In my spc player I tuned the interpolation off and set the output freq to 32Kz (snes native). Now when I hit play what I hear is sharper by a long shot but theres one large problem, EVERYTHING is sharper. Things like bass drums and guitars and other low freq sounds get that nasty aliasing which just make them sound bad and practically kills the bass. Putting the setting back to what I usually have them at and then pushing the treble on my amp and soundcard to the max sharpened the playback to practically the same levels with one major difference, the low freq sounds were nowhere nearly as poisoned by high freq artefacts.

But I'm going on alot about sampled stuff here. I dare say that removing filters on stuff with (nealy) pure synth audio is a good thing because most of the time those filters are to compensate for usually cheap circuit design.

[tepples]

The only samples that'd sound better without it is on saw waves and square waves.

And possibly certain percussion instruments with more noise than pitch.

In the process of developing Luminesweeper, I made a GBA tech demo that played a Nine Inch Nails song while displaying a "Mode 7" (really mode 1) screen. Someone on a forum wondered why the sound was so much better than my GSM player. They used the same codec, the same bitrate, and the same sample rate. It turned out that the GSM player was doing linear interpolation, while the demo was using nearest-neighbor (no) interpolation. So to explain the difference, I made this file:
An interpolation from "The legend of MAX"

1. Original sample
2. #1 low-passed at 9 kHz, corresponding to the 18157 Hz sample rate used by GSM Player and Luminesweeper
3. #2 with every other sample repeated, corresponding to "No Interpolation" in Modplug Tracker
4. #3 convolved with [.5 .5] filter, corresponding to "Linear" in Modplug Tracker

I guess "no interpolation" creates fake treble that some people accustomed to chiptunes might find pleasing, much like the spectral band replication in mp3PRO and some AAC variants.

but theres one large problem, EVERYTHING is sharper.

Then perhaps Sony should have included switchable interpolation modes per channel.

[Bregalad]

Then perhaps Sony should have included switchable interpolation modes per channel.

Perhaps.... I just did some tests and listened carefully songs with different interpolations. Now that it was pointed to, it is really obvious Cubic sounds the best. Gaussian interpolation make it sounds like a lowpass filter where that "muffled" sounds comes while the cubic interpolaiton would have been perfect. This is especially noticeable in the battle music of Chrono Trigger, the drums sounds really more clear with cubic interpolation while they sound muffled with Gaussian interpolation (the drums are recorded at a rate HIGHER than 32 kHz so the sample rate isn't going to make anything sound muffled here).

Linar interpolation sounds quite good too, but sounds terrible for high rates are arcitfacts are created, this is especially noticeable in "Slam Shuffle" or "Techno de Chocobo" in FF6.
No interpolation create lots of artifacts like tepples says "fake treble" or just random noise. There is also the artifact problem very noticeable in FF6. I don't see how this could be considered to sound better.

[TmEE]

I don't see why interpolation wouldn't be desirable. You can disable interpolation in some players, and you can see how bad it sounds without it. This basically create "staircase waveforms" on samples, and sounds bad. The only samples that'd sound better without it is on saw waves and square waves.

Maybe Cubic or Sine interpolation is better than Gaussian though if that is what you mean. It outputs better treble. But if you want higer frequencies to sound good the only way is to use a higher sample rate = more memory.

I don't find no interpolation bad, the opposite. With most interpolation methods you get rather muffled sound or something that is still not very bright...
Sinc was the only interpolation that "fixes" lows but retains highs, but it happens to be quite CPU heavy compared to other methods.

This is all highly subjective so there's not much point in arguing about it...

Speaking of amps, rather than putting a lot of effort into removing filters, why don't you just turn up the treble / high freq eq on your amp? It won't go high enough? Then just add an external graphic equaliser separate and bump up the high freqs on that.

There's not much effect on turning up ohighs n the EQ if there is nothing to begin with. And there's not much effort needed to get rid of LPFs, just locate some capacitors and take them out. If you just turn up highs you get nearly no difference, just possible line noise increases, nothing much more.

My point about the Amiga is that unlike most other machines, the filter on the Amiga is completely optional and can be disabled and enabled in software. By forcing the filters off the quality of certain types of sounds are degraded (more on this below) along with, more importantly, the composer's original vision.

Amiga has mandatory filters with cutoff a bit below 10KHz and optional filters which bring down the cutoff point to ~5KHz when enabled.
I could have left in the optional filter, but seems nearly all games enable it and when I listened how things were with and without, I most definitely preferred no filters.
I also removed filters because things were cutting into CDDA sound too. I know how my music CDs are supposed to sound and they sounded rather poor through the CD32.

Turning filters off degrades sound quality you here me say? Lets take StarWing for example, a decent mix of both electronic band style music and classical orchestral music. In my spc player I tuned the interpolation off and set the output freq to 32Kz (snes native). Now when I hit play what I hear is sharper by a long shot but theres one large problem, EVERYTHING is sharper. Things like bass drums and guitars and other low freq sounds get that nasty aliasing which just make them sound bad and practically kills the bass. Putting the setting back to what I usually have them at and then pushing the treble on my amp and soundcard to the max sharpened the playback to practically the same levels with one major difference, the low freq sounds were nowhere nearly as poisoned by high freq artefacts.

Only thing that somewhat suffers from no filtering is the bass, percussion is something that always improves, especially if the sampels are from a real drumkit rather than synthesized (I've been in a band, I know how percussion should sound I'm no trying to sound cocky here).
But the thing with low freqs is much easier to get around to than highs, mainly because low freqs have very high amplitude compared to all else so they're quite easy to mess with and you can pretty much smooth them out with an analog equalizer while retaining highs etc. One thing where analog definitely beats digital is equalization stuff... there's nearly no need to fear clipping on any setting as long as input signal is not too loud, that is, with decent equipment...

But I'm going on alot about sampled stuff here. I dare say that removing filters on stuff with (nealy) pure synth audio is a good thing because most of the time those filters are to compensate for usually cheap circuit design.

Filters are there to get rid of the staircase waveforms that were mentioned earlier, so as to get more natural sound... recreation filters are what they're called. As everyone have noticed, I'm not fond of them

[RushJet1]

The music I'll filter the most is GBA music... I dunno about you, but listening to unfiltered 5Khz music? MEH.

[NotTheCommonDose]

Everyone says the SNES has better sound than the MD/Genesis but I find SNES sounds terribly muffled most of the time, like they're sampled at very low rates...

Sounds like a made-up argument of a biased Saga fanboy who refuses to admit that the Super NES is like 10 times superior to his beloved Sega genesis in therms of graphics & sound (sorry couldn't resist...)

Okay some SNES games sounds bad this is a fact, but it's all their fault for using bad samples.

What, like Super Mario World and other "Nintendo" driver based games?

[Bregalad]

Yes exactly, SMW is the example of a game using lame samples, but it's not alone. Zelda III uses really bad samples although it has really good music. It could probably sound 10 times better with the same hardware. There is also many non-Nintendo games who falls in this category too. (Soul Blazer is one who made my ears bleed).

[RushJet1]

Also.. another genesis soundtrack that doesn't particularly sound like others is Super Bomberman 5.

[tomaitheous]

Also.. another genesis soundtrack that doesn't particularly sound like others is Super Bomberman 5.

Genesis? Do you mean SNES?

[NotTheCommonDose]

The only Nintendo game I could think of that has "genuine" sound for a SNES game is Winter Gold. Yeah, I know it shamefully wasn't released everywhere but still it counts.