Listening to Amiga music with too much treble makes it sound terrible!

[Foebane]

I have two ways in which I listen to Amiga music, amongst other platforms: My main PC with WinUAE and original Amiga files with Skullcandy earphones with a lot of bass, and on my Android phone with a bunch of MP4s (videos) of Amiga demos with a low-ish bitrate and earphones with a lot of treble, and I can really hear every little imperfection and noise on the latter.

All I can say is, Amiga music is best heard with little treble, as all the clicks and hiss and low sample rate and noise and even low bitrate artefacts are blended out, leaving just the melody and the intended sound.

I remember, a year after having had my A500 in 1990, ordering some device called the Sound Enhancer, thinking it would make my Amiga sound better, but it simply boosted the treble... a LOT. Ultimately, I didn't use it. Amiga music sounds better with little treble, frankly.

[Amiga1992]

Nobody should listen to any music with anything but as flat a response as possible. Exaggerating bass is also terrible.

Now consider that most of this music was probably played in the crappy 1084 monitor speakers, so there's a lot to be said about listening to the Amiga in a hi-fi setting, it's just not what a lot people are used to. Add to this the fact of different filters on different Amiga models, and you have some standardization issues. The Sound Enhancer you didn't like, probably was made to compensate for the always-on high pass filter the A500 has. An unmodified A600 will also benefit from a bump on higher frequencies. An A1200 doesn't need such a thing.

Also in your later case, you are probably also hearing a lot of shitty MP4 artifaction, you say yourself they are low-bit, this will include lots of garbage. So why do you do this to yourself?

The Amiga itself doesn't have that much noise unless you are on a silent part and you are extremely anal. The music I put in my Youtube channel, which I master, is put through a gate so most of this shit isn't heard.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Akira

Also in your later case, you are probably also hearing a lot of shitty MP4 artifaction, you say yourself they are low-bit, this will include lots of garbage. So why do you do this to yourself?

I used Nvidia Shadowplay to record WinUAE directly, got excellent results but large file sizes, and discovered Handbrake, which I used the default settings to reduce each video size by two-thirds, but only discovered SLIGHT artefacting in some videos after I'd recorded dozens of them, and the last thing I want to do is record them all over again. Besides, I only heard oddities in some instances, and I have a whole bunch of downloaded YouTube videos for PC demos as well, and I think they sound WORSE in a lot of cases. The point was to fill my phone's memory with as many videos as possible when I was away from my PC.

[Stratosplat]

8-bit music files sound so much better recorded from Schism Tracker (an Impulse Tracker port for modern hardware) running on a PC when you use the '16-bit, 8-tap FIR Filter', 'Oversampling' and 'Noise Reduction' options in the Preferences menu (shift-F5).

I realise that a purist would never do this, but it does make them far easier on the ear for extended listening sessions. I don't think any other MOD players come even close to the quality of the digital filtering Schism Tracker has to offer. Jeffrey Lim is a genius.

[ Show youtube player ]

^ All 8-bit samples

[Foebane]

I use the following recording settings on Shadowplay: 480p, 30fps and 30mbps. On Handbrake I just used the "Normal" audio output: AAC audio, 160kbps and Dolby Pro Logic II.

With these, I have recorded Atari 8-Bit demos as well, and the Ataris sound fine as well.

However, I also wanted to record ZX Spectrum demos, but Shadowplay refused to work with Spectaculator, so I was forced to use the emulator's internal AVI RLE recorder. BUT, using the same Handbrake settings yielded fuzzy video (which I cannot improve) and the AY audio was horrible! In the end, I had to switch audio encoding to MP3 192kbps for much-improved sound.

I used Shadowplay to record Atari ST video (from Steem SSE) and again used the Handbrake AAC settings to convert, but again the AY sound was HORRIBLE. In fact, it seems that AAC has a problem with Yamaha AY audio.

Finally, recorded Amstrad CPC video with Shadowplay (after having poor results with its internal recorder) and just converted the audio to MP3 directly.

As of now, I have 500 videos from seven computer platforms taking up about 20Gb of memory on my phone, and the quality varies enormously. The Youtube downloads of PC demos are particularly poor in the visual side of things, but that cannot be helped. I just wanted a portable collection of Demoscene prods.