Amiga audio early lead lost..

[Thorham]

Sarvet r&d resources were spent improving gfx where amiga was far behind PC-XT.

Amiga was far behind PC-XT? How?

[Thorham]

Paula is an interesting 80's sound chip but the things that make it good are mainly due to the vast amounts of sound artefacts it produces. This mean it's great if you want a coloured crunchy sound but it's pretty much useless for even normal audio playback these days.

I find that when playing back CDs in 44Khz 14 bit stereo with calibration, there's not much coloring at all. In fact, I think most of the coloring in the 8 bit 4 channel mods is because of the used samples and tracker effects, and not because of the DACs.

Playing back CDs sounds perfectly fine, just not in 8 bit (the horror!) and you do need double scan modes for the 44 Khz playback.

[Thorham]

I can still hear quantization noise and aliasing however, particularly on gentle volume ramps in quiet parts of music, even having painstakingly calibrated my machine.

Yeah, there's still some noise in those soft spots.

These days, it's hidden behind digital noise. I suspect some caps have dried out wherever the analogue stage is decoupled.

Time for a re-cap perhaps?

It doesn't bother me particularly however, since any multichannel mods I write end up rendered to disk and when I do use Paula as a sample player, I usually want all that colouring.

But what is that coloring? Apart from some noisiness I don't hear any.

Personally, I find even the uncalibrated 14 bit output sounds fantastic. Maybe I'm biased.

Perhaps, but calibration should still reduce the noisiness of the soft parts of music.

Viewed in that light, you really ought to calibrate your CyberSound driver and use that calibrated output to get the best fidelity from your system.

It's a pity the calibration software doesn't allow calibrating the left and right channels separately, instead, all channels are calibrated at the same time

[Thorham]

The Amiga's low pass filter is far too low to leave enabled when you're outputting 44k.

That filter is useless.

A lot of people don't notice the crunchiness, whether this is due to lack of sensitivity to high frequencies (I can hear frequencies higher than is predicted for my age) or lack of interest I don't know.

Are you talking about 44khz 14 bit calibrated? If so, there is certainly some noise in the softer parts of music, which is MUCH worse without calibration. If not, then what do you mean with crunchiness?

I was struck by how much the sound output reminded me of the Amiga's audio.

That's just because of the samples they used. That typical Amiga sound is caused by the samples used in modules.