What is up with the Pandora's soundstage?

[Haze]

While I'm not going the question the quality of the Pandora's audio hardware there does seem to be something going on in software. The audio sounds "processed", like there is a rather aggressive V EQ setting in effect.

In games certain sound effects are being pushed forward in the soundstage while others are being drowned out. Two good examples are Strider and A Link to the Past. In Strider the trademark "shink" of Strider Hiryu's sword sounds completely wrong. The correct sound is there in the mix but it is being drowned out. The beginning of A Link to the Past is even worse, the rain sound-effect completely dominates the sound stage. I'm guessing its set up like this to improve perceived audio quality from the built in speakers but I'm not a fan. Is there anyway to turn this effect off? Ideally I'd like a nice flat EQ and a nice balanced soundstage.

 

[iprice]

I really noticed this in my DinoDefense game after developing it without a Pandora. Once I actually got my Panda, I played the game and was horrified - it sounded dreadful through the speakers; lots of bass was missing and everything sounded equalized. Listening to it via headphones and all was pretty much as it should be, but it really is off under normal conditions. A shame.

 

[CocoCreekFisherman]

I really noticed this in my DinoDefense game after developing it without a Pandora. Once I actually got my Panda, I played the game and was horrified - it sounded dreadful through the speakers; lots of bass was missing and everything sounded equalized. Listening to it via headphones and all was pretty much as it should be, but it really is off under normal conditions. A shame.

I agree.. I use my Klipsch buds for certain games and they sound much better to me. Don't use Apple/iphone/ipad buds though!!

 

[TrashyMG]

For people that are not tone def, which myself I am tone def.. I've heard it said the SNES emu does have some sound issues.. there is a precision sound mode that can be enabled with a trade-off of emulator speed.

 

[Binky]

I really noticed this in my DinoDefense game after developing it without a Pandora. Once I actually got my Panda, I played the game and was horrified - it sounded dreadful through the speakers; lots of bass was missing and everything sounded equalized. Listening to it via headphones and all was pretty much as it should be, but it really is off under normal conditions. A shame.

Tiny speakers are tinny speakers. Getting good base out of small speakers is difficult and expensive.

 

[PokeParadox]

Rule of thumb is to always use decent headphones with a handheld for decent sound...

 

[klapse]

Getting good BASS without earbuds (which create a sealed compartment in the ear) requires large speakers. Tone DEAF people also notice missing bass frequencies. "Tone deafness is the lack of relative pitch, or the inability to distinguish between musical notes that is not due to the lack of musical training or education."


Haze, I am assuming you are talking about the sound through headphones. Sound through speakers isn't going to be good, obviously. Try playing some high bitrate ogg/mp3 files or flacs through headphones. Is the equalized sound still present?

 

[TrashyMG]

Klaspe lure complete, you actually took longer than I thought to show up.

 

[Haze]

Getting good BASS without earbuds (which create a sealed compartment in the ear) requires large speakers. Tone DEAF people also notice missing bass frequencies. "Tone deafness is the lack of relative pitch, or the inability to distinguish between musical notes that is not due to the lack of musical training or education."


Haze, I am assuming you are talking about the sound through headphones. Sound through speakers isn't going to be good, obviously. Try playing some high bitrate ogg/mp3 files or flacs through headphones. Is the equalized sound still present?

Striders sword and Zelda's rain are just as bad with headphones as they are via the pandora's speakers. Playing Strider with headphones frankly sounds really weird, its like everything is there but the emphasis is all messed up. I honestly don't know if this is a problem with the Pandora itself or the emulator though Picodrive is generally rock solid in all its incarnations.

Music played via Rockbox sounds fine by the way.

For people that are not tone def, which myself I am tone def.. I've heard it said the SNES emu does have some sound issues.. there is a precision sound mode that can be enabled with a trade-off of emulator speed.

How do you turn it on?

 

[Ian J]

I would say this is down to emulation if FLACs / wavs sound OK.

 

[TrashyMG]

How do you turn it on?

Took me a while to find the post about this.. but try turning on Alternative Sampling decoding.

 

[Haze]

Huh Its possible some of the audio issues might be caused by the Pandoras audio capabilities being so good it is exposing flaws. 

 

[ZXDunny]

Audio in emulators is hard to get just right. In order to produce sound, you have to "sample" the emulated hardware periodically - for example, to fill a bank of 44.1khz sound on a CPU running at 3.5MHz, you sample every 79 CPU cycles. Kind of - it's actually slightly more than that, but not a whole cycle. So you have to appproximate - firstly to accommodate the rounding error and secondly because the sound can change significantly in that time (opcodes in my emulator can execute in a minimum of 4 cycles, so theoretically the sound may be altered many times during the period that is represented by one sample).

So in order to maintain some kind of speed, an author may only query the emulated sound hardware once per sample - and thus lose rapid changes. For more accurate sound, you need to query the sound hardware many more times per sample and perform some sort of blending. Simple averaging is popular, and helps with the loss of speed left to the emulation, but other methods although more CPU-intensive produce better sound at an increased cost in time to process.

On a system like Pandora and other lower-speed hardware, the trade-off is often very audible sound degradation because our ears are more sensitive to dropped information than our eyes are (many don't notice frameskipping in video if it's done well and consistently).

D.

 

[Haze]

That is something that should be fixable with further optimization though yes?

 

[TrashyMG]

^Assuming we have anyone up to the challenge of optimizing the emulator.

 

[Haze]

Hmm I hope someone steps up and accepts the mantle.

By the way, with all the teething trouble I've been having I hope I haven't given the wrong impression. Despite its flaws I do actually quite like my Pandora!

 

[klapse]

Klaspe lure complete, you actually took longer than I thought to show up.

Your welcome.

 

[ZXDunny]

That is something that should be fixable with further optimization though yes?

That depends on who's doing the optimisation. More free CPU cycles per frame means that other effects (such as transparencies, higher resolution renderers etc) can be run at higher frame rates. If the coder doing the work isn't interested in audio as much as other effects, it will likely be a case of "well, it sounds about right" and that will be it.

D.