Hello everyone, I had a question which hopefully someone here can answer.
I've been a fan of Bannister's work for years now and I am curious if anyone else has noticed that the sound it outputs in more recent iterations is too midrangey/muffled/flat? In older versions (pre-ver. 5 and older) the audio was super-normalized and too sharp with noise channels that were too loud, but now the channels sounds a tad too dull. Especially the noise channels on NSFs sound like they are too buried and indistinct. I tried to compare the sound on Game Music Box but there seems to be this issue to a certain extent too (maybe because it was based on some of the AO code?).

I've noticed Wav exporting seems to make it even flatter, more so than the sound coming out of an actual console. The music just lacks that "snappiness" to some of it to my ears. A minor nitpick since overall the sound is excellent and it's great that it supports so many formats, but I was wondering if this was all in my head or if anyone else could weigh in on whether this sound is more or less normal or if it is something that could be fixed?

Given that AO uses a different engine for each file format it's generally unhelpful to claim any sort of global phenomenon with the sound output since we can prove you're hallucinating ;-)

If you actually mean just NSF/NSFEs AO currently uses Game Music Box's code, which is pretty accurate to what a real console outputs, and doesn't include distortion/high frequency hash like most other emulators (this hash makes the sound artificially crisp/sharp as you noticed in pre-0.5 versions).

Are you comparing to real hardware or other emulators?

I'm comparing it to the real hardware (at least as far as NES and SNES goes...).

A/O *is* extremely accurate overall, but I still hold that its output is slightly flatter than what actually comes out of the consoles - I wasn't implying that the distortion of earlier models was more accurate, I just meant that they were shooting at 120%, while it seems like the new versions are closer to 90%, if that makes any sense. And as far as NSFs at least, the noise channel's attack is a bit too short to my ears; games like Asterix which have fairly refined channel interplay sound noticably less staccato and more muffled than they do coming out of my ol' NES. Maybe my NES is haunted by a 18 khz ghost.

anyways, it's still the best program of its kind out there, so this isn't a complaint, just an observation that I wondered if anyone else noticed.