If you want to play tunes that don't need punchy bass or somewhat realistically faked electric guitars you're almost entirely shit outta luck with the cheap piece of crap FM synth the Megadrive had.
Yep. The amount of ignorance surrounding MD audio is enormous. Doesn't help that people refuse to listen (literally, as in this case) or write off what they do come across as "lucky" or "just good artistically" or "happening to play to it's strengths".
What the instrument can do is still what the instrument can do, even if it's not easy to get the best results from.
Interestingly, there were several versions of the MS sound hardware which produced surprisingly different results. Unsurprisingly, by far the best version was in the first Megadrives - most people who encountered MD audio never heard it at its best. Will try to find some examples on the net tonight.
My Megadrives are early phats with the best audio. Made myself some a stereo scart cable too, and can split the audio off through my old skoo' analogue stereo amp. Soooooooooo good.
Not really, I'd say... Amdahl's law limits the useful "parallelity" of serial CPUs. (Same with parallel designs too of course, but in graphics rendering for example we haven't hit the ceiling yet.)
Whether the best Genesis music (or more particularly this track) stands as impressive fourth-gen console audio. Because the consoles have different strengths and "impressive" isn't very specific, there's some fuzziness or subjectivity to the discussion, hence there's something to disagree on.
I don't think that's the best way of putting it. It wasn't any sort of ultra-high-end thing, but insofar as it's an FM synth chip, there's not all that much horribly wrong with it. (Although its output mixing technique was sort of sketchy and had some strange results.)
IMO the better question is how relatively effective it is as the main audio system for a console, and without being backed up by a reasonably capable PCM setup. It could do a lot of cool stuff with the sounds it produced, and it could output them with excellent clarity, but it wound up unable to accurately produce many tones in the first place. Hence even Gauntlet 4, which is an interesting showcase for what Genesis can do with "orchestral" sounds, still has an "electronic music" vibe to it.
*Unf unf unf* yep they had stereo headphones! Not all stereo headphone MDs has the best sound chip, but the early ones did. You can make an RGB scart cable for the MD that feeds the stereo audio into the cable (this is wat I did) and then if you put the scart through an audio splitter box you can reroute your adio at will without having to plug/unplug things.
For best results turn the headphone volume up to minimise noise (although noise is pretty decent considering).
If you're even keener you can add a custom port to the back of MD, feed the RGB video to it (make sure to avoid the composite line or sheild it because it interferes with the RGB lines), and take a line straight from the audio out bypassing the volume control.
MD audio is seriously good on early MDs, through stereo. Mono through RF hurts the MD more than it hurts the SNES, IMO.
