SID loves Paula

[psxphill]

Actually, if he replayed the mp3's on the Amiga with some crap AHI-settings and/or bad mp3-decoder, then the IFF-file might actually sound better on the Amiga

Also real time playback of mp3 on the Amiga was pretty CPU intensive, you could help it by dropping the quality. If that is what he is comparing then it may be true. Although the mono/stereo thing sounds like something in his Amiga may have been broken, once in IFF then stereo should be fine.
 
Having the AHI sample rate set low could explain his problem. Or if he was outputting 14bit audio and it was't calibrated properly.
 
I'm intrigued what setup he had, an 030@50mhz (which is what I had) was still too slow for full quality mp3 playback.
 
I quite like the crunchy sound of low sample rate audio after hearing digital samples on the c64 for so long, so it didn't bother me that much.

[hooligan]

Actually, if he replayed the mp3's on the Amiga with some crap AHI-settings and/or bad mp3-decoder, then the IFF-file might actually sound better on the Amiga

True

[itix]

Emulating SID with Paula did sound good as well! With these classic machines, I find SID plays better along if Paula makes the beats and rythms, I bet it would sound alot better than an MP3 and plugged on a hifi!

It sounds better because PlaySID emulation is far from accurate. Especially digitized samples sound better on Paula because technique to replay sample data is completely different than in the original SID chip.

[commodorejohn]

I quite like the crunchy sound of low sample rate audio after hearing digital samples on the c64 for so long, so it didn't bother me that much.

It depends on the kind of music, but yeah, when it's something actually written with that in mind, it has an enjoyably raw feel to it.

[freqmax]

Actually, sines can be reproduced very accurately in MP3 since it works by splitting a sample into its frequency portions (via FFT).

More precisely many C64 sounds are square, triangle, sine, noise modified in frequency and amplitude vs time. And likely to contain many high frequencies to make it sound right. Exactly the frequencies that lossy compression will remove.

Also intentionally used misaligned sample frequencies on Amiga can suffer in the compression process.

[commodorejohn]

SID doesn't generate sine waves - that third one is saw.