Configuration for best sound fidelity?

[Leandro Jardim]

Hi,

I was playing some MODs with WinUAE, and was curious to find out how to configure UAE and Windows for the best sound fidelity in comparison to the real machine.

I have seen many other threads asking about a similar question, but they generaly ask about the sound quality. Note that I am talking about sound fidelity and not sound quality.

The problem is that I can't myself find that, because I don't own my Amiga 500 more since a looong time ago, and at the same time, I never had the chance to hear the sound from one of them near me anymore.

So what is the best configuration for the sound depth and frequency, to give to the WinUAE sound the same feel of the real machine?

And the interpolation filter, is it indispensable to nicely emulate the sound of the Paula chip? Is there any difference with it or without?

Thanks.

[Toni Wilen]

I guess answer is as usual, it depends. (I'll ignore any sound comparisons unless they are blind tests using exact same same amp and speakers and matched volume.)

I personally don't want any filtering at all even if means "wrong" sound (A500 filter can't be fully disabled without hardware hacks. LED off won't disable it completely)

Same with stereo separation, "real" output would have full stereo separation but it can also sound annoying depending on your setup.

--

Don't select too low output frequency, it only reduces quality because resampling is always needed. Just select 44100 or 48000. In theory anti or sinc is better than no interpolation (don't select any other interpolation modes!)

[chip]

It seems to me that the "default" sound settings of WinUAE are OK

[Leandro Jardim]

Thanks for everyone.

[Nova]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Don't select too low output frequency, it only reduces quality because resampling is always needed. Just select 44100 or 48000. In theory anti or sinc is better than no interpolation (don't select any other interpolation modes!)

interresting topic -- i also was looking for the best setup to mimic the amiga sound fidelity for mod conversions, once.

back then with deliplayer, i made sure to turn off all optimizations and filters, believing that this is as accurate as it can get in comparison to a real machine (well - except for the sample rate & bits per sample). seems i was wrong about that

later on with xmplay and delix plugin, i noticed some slight audible differences to the deli conversions of before, but never was able to balance them. backends i supposed to be on par.

[rutra80]

Amiga audio is quite unusual both in hardware & software.
I don't know how accurate is WinUAE implementation, but for MODs libopenmpt and foo_openmpt54 are said to take care of the nuances.

For example, Amiga doesn't resample - it sets sampling rate of a given channel to desired value. On PC you need to resample everything to one sampling rate. I'd go with 48000Hz because Amiga had possibility to go even higher. But then you won't probably hear a difference even between 32000Hz & 44100Hz, and hardware lowpass filters of Amiga filter out most of the high frequency content anyway...
Blep synthesis would be best for interpolation but WinUAE doesn't support it, so I'd go with no interpolation...

[Photon]

Originally Posted by chip

It seems to me that the "default" sound settings of WinUAE are OK

Yes, I think this is what even top musicians prefer (accepting that it can't be perfectly the same).

Since the Amiga had digital audio, the difference is not that big. The biggest difference is that modern sound cards and speakers are much more revealing, while you may not have had a top HiFi system back then. (Some also boost the treble, especially headphones.) So you will hear every sampling artifact from consumer equipment from that time, if the game is old.

My WinUAE PC has a normal sound card and a good 2.1 system where I can dial down the treble a little.

If you want genuine plastic case monitor mono audio I'm out

Likewise for genuine wooden TV RF noise

100% separation is 100% genuine ofc, but probably everyone is on board with less because 100% only melted together if speakers were either side of the monitor, and you need them farther apart for a proper speaker setup.

Originally Posted by Leandro Jardim

And the interpolation filter, is it indispensable to nicely emulate the sound of the Paula chip? Is there any difference with it or without?

The filter is software-controlled (and sometimes the software leaves it on for reasons other than masking bad sample quality), and WinUAE allows you to force it off. To hear the sound generated by the software "as-is" (or "as-was"), you must not force it off. But because of the mistakes, maybe this is a default I should change. It's just that when I run old stuff I guess I want the muffled sound, IDK.

For the Soundtracker era, MAYBE leave it on. For everything after that, I think force it off. If you run the correct trackers or players ofc, it's always turned off so it hasn't been an issue.

[chip]

I copied the post from another similar thread, since this is something important to me

Indeed i love Amiga music and sound issues are interesting for me

Here what i wrote about sound fidelity of WinUAE

Please keep in mind that the try i'm talking about is done with the deafult sound options of WinUAE, nothing particular then

Here the text :

"I guess WinUAE audio emulation it's nearly perfect

I made this try

I created MP3s from audio recording by WinUAE and compared these recordings to the MP3s of the SOAMC project

This project is a collection of MP3s recorded using the real hardware

So, in other words, i compared the emulated audio against the real audio and, surprise, no difference at all"

Hope this explain my point of view regarding audio quality of WinUAE