Trackers that do 14-bit sound on 68000?

[Wilse]

I had spent many years expanding my big box Amiga so that little of the audio work I was doing on it actually used the original motherboard hardware, instead relying on third party CPU cards and AHI audio cards, etc. So I don't see the switch to PC DAWs as a move away from Amigas, as I had essentially already moved away from the hardware that made the Amiga unique when still using my Amiga.

I never thought of it like that before. :-)

The last "semi-serious" audio work (i.e. recording some demo songs) I did on an Amiga was with HD-Rec on the A1 about eight years ago, before switching to Logic on the Mac, which is still my main DAW. I was using an SBLive sound card, on a G4 PPC, with a MIDI i/f that Alfred Faust made for me, so I suppose I had moved away from "Amiga" hardware too.

Having said that, I recently put a new CMOS in my several-years-dead-A1 to get it going again and last night downloaded the latest version of HD-Rec.

Haven't done anything with it yet, right enough.

[Wilse]

But I never once thought the Amiga had a "unique or distinctive sound" (other than the limitations of 8bit samples) - I always thought the sound hardware could have been better - i wanted a successor to SID.

I'd tend to go along with this. You could maybe argue that the method of working was unique to the Amiga but not really the sound.

[Wilse]

Well, some argue that the Paula's non-linear output gives it a distinctive sound,

Yeah, those guys have better ears than me.

[Wilse]

Perhaps not better ears, but probably actively looking for a distinctive quality that can be found in Paula's audio reproduction...

Her hardware does colour the audio quite a bit, and I like to use her for 8bit sample play back (though I prefer record the audio samples on my Mac with it's 24bit FireWire audio box, to ensure a clean recording).

All the old Samplers were quite distinctive, which is why I still use my Roland W-30 for all 12bit work

Well, as far as Paula goes, there was also the added link in the chain of a variety of parallel port, 8-bit samplers. These add their own colour to the mixture.
Even still, to my ears my 8 bit sample collection, some of which I sampled myself, some of which I didn't and some of which probably wasn't even recorded via Paula, sounded very similar when played back via different hardware to what it did on my Amiga.

I know there will be certain, specific sounds which are audibly different when played back via Paula than other 8-bit chips but my ears have never noticed this to any degree where I could say with certainty that I preferred the Paula version. This is despite around a decade of pretty-much-daily sampling and recording on the A1200.

I should also add that I can't tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and a 16 bit .wav either. However, there were a couple of youngsters on my sound engineering course who claimed they could. So, in my case, I think it *is* my ears (or at least how I perceive what they hear).  

In such circumstances the pursuit of said, unique sounds would take me into a spiral of diminishing returns that I'm far too old to devote the time too.

[Wilse]

I thought he meant take a 3 second clip from a 320 kbps mp3 and compare it to the same 3 seconds clipped from a 16 bit wav?