Sound and music quality downgrades

PkR

As unfortunate as it is, sound and music quality has suffered almost as badly as textures and lighting in SADX. Let’s have examine some of the sound problems plaguing the ports.

This page is going to focus mainly on the PC version and later ports. This is because the Gamecube version’s sound format hasn’t been fully reverse engineered yet to allow direct sound quality comparions (although we can make some rough estimations). However, issues related to sound bugs and missing sounds mentioned here also affect the Gamecube version.

There are several types of sound issues in SADX, and they are specific to different ports. Here’s a list of issues and the ports affected by them:

  • The music no longer loops – 2004 PC port
  • Lower quality voice clips – 2004 PC port (all clips), Steam and nextgen console ports (only some clips)
  • Lag/stutter caused by the voice file format/implementation – 2004 PC port
  • Lower quality sound effects – 2004 PC port, Steam and nextgen console ports
  • Missing processing effects on some sounds – all ports
  • Sounds being cut off, looping incorrectly or playing too early/too late – all ports
  • Some sounds are missing – all ports
  • Wrong soundbanks are loaded, causing wrong sounds to play – all ports
  • Sound volume problems: some or all sounds are too quiet (PC 2004 port) or too loud (Steam/nextgen console ports)
  • Sound playback problems (sounds/voice clips playing in lower quality than the actual sound/voice files) – Steam and nextgen console ports

Let’s talk about the music first. The Gamecube, Steam and nextgen console ports use ADX music files that are the same as in the Dreamcast version. On the Dreamcast, some music tracks were downsampled in the versions of SA1 that contained both English and Japanese audio clips – this downsampling was undone for the GameCube version, so unless you own the Japanese version of SA1, the Gamecube version has the best quality music.

For the 2004 PC port, ADX music files were converted into the Windows Media Audio format. The main problem with the WMA format is lack of looping, which means the music in the PC port fades out and restarts at some point, while in other versions of the game it loops seamlessly.

Character voice clips were also converted into WMA for the 2004 PC port. This would’ve been fine because the voice clips don’t need loop points, but the conversion reduced the quality of the resulting voice clips. Here’s a voice clip from both versions with audible quality difference despite the WMA one using higher sampling rate and stereo sound:

Dreamcast

PC 2004

A well-known problem with the 2004 PC port is the stutter that happens during the kart race when you hit the jump panels and Sonic says “woohoo!”. When this happens, the game pauses for a brief moment. This has something to do with the voice clips being in the WMA format because it doesn’t happen in the ports that use ADX audio. Thanks to the Mod Loader you can fix the problem in the 2004 PC port by installing a mod that replaces all WMA voice clips with ADX voice clips.

Although the Steam and nextgen console ports go back to ADX voice clips, which are the same as on the Dreamcast/Gamecube for the most part, there are several voice clips that were edited. Those edited clips are lower quality than the original voice clips. There are only 9 English voice clips and 11 Japanese voice clips that are different from the Dreamcast version. Most of those edited voice clips have to do with the options menu, where the “Options” part was cut out for some reason. You can hear that the edited voice clip sounds a bit muffled:

Dreamcast

Steam

Now let’s talk about reduced sound quality. The easiest way to illustrate the reduction of sound quality is to compare some of the common sound effects across different versions. Here’s the jump sound:

Dreamcast

PC 2004

And here’s the ring loss sound:

Dreamcast

PC 2004

Steam

Apart from format differences such as sampling rate, there are also volume differences, missing processing effects and broken loops in many sounds. The biggest problem with sounds in the 2004 PC port is that they are too quiet. In the Dreamcast version, almost every Action Stage and Adventure Field has some kind of a background noise that is loud enough to be audible without washing out the music. Those sounds are still present in SADX, but they are so quiet it may seem they are missing. One example of such noises is the machinery humming in Final Egg Act 1, which you are supposed to hear right from the start, but it’s barely audible in SADX. The sea in Station Square hotel is also barely audible in SADX. Another example is the ticking sound of the clock in Speed Highway Act 3, which is there but due to a combination of low volume and SADX’s positional audio glitch it’s rarely heard ingame.

Some sounds are supposed to play multiple times but in SADX they play only once. For example, if you watch the cutscene before the Chaos 0 fight, you can hear the sound of bullets falling on the ground after the police shoot Chaos. In the Dreamcast version, that sound played multiple times in a row, which corresponded to multiple bullets hitting the ground, but in SADX it sounds like a single bullet. A similar problem happens with Zero’s chest thumping sound, which is barely audible in SADX because it plays only once.

The above problem is ironically the result of a bug fix. The original Dreamcast game has a number of sound bugs related to sounds not stopping when needed, which chokes the game’s sound queue and makes it stop all other sounds. For example, at the start of Emerald Coast if you walk slowly in a certain spot in the area where dolphins jump out of the water, you can get the water splash sound to repeat endlessly until you move, which will force the game to cancel all other sounds, including background noises. Another known instance of this bug is Knuckles’ Maximum Heat Attack charge sound, which kills all other sounds permanently when you charge it. To work around this issue, SADX made it impossible for most sounds to play more than once by default. Unless a sound is played with a specific flag that allows it to repeat, the game will check if the same sound is already playing, and not play it again if it’s already in the sound queue. While this fixes the above issues, it introduces other issues where you actually are supposed to hear the same sound playing multiple times.

On top of that, there are several bugs in the ports that cause sounds to play too early or too late, or not play at all. The game’s sound timers don’t always account for 60 FPS, which causes some sounds to get cut off or loop incorrectly. A good example of that is the looping background engine noise of the Egg Hornet, which plays fine at 30 FPS, but cuts off at 60 FPS (interestingly enough the Dreamcast version plays it fine even if it’s hacked to render at 60 FPS).

As for the sounds that play too early, most of the cutscenes involving the Tornado crashing or landing have timing problems. For example, in the cutscene where the Tornado 2 lands on the Egg Carrier, the metal screeching sound plays before the Tornado actually touches the Egg Carrier, which doesn’t happen in the Dreamcast version. The Dreamcast version also has a few sound problems like that (for example, the sound of the Tornado crashing in Tails’ opening cutscene plays too early and gets cut off), but SADX has many more.

The ports have code bugs in the positional audio system that cause some sounds to never play ingame. In addition, some sounds were removed or disabled on purpose. It’s difficult to talk about all of them in detail, but here’s a list of SADX sound bugs that weren’t there in the Dreamcast version. This isn’t a complete list, some of these were reported on Sonic Retro forums:

  • The spindash sound gets cut off if you have the Light Speed Dash upgrade, while in the Dreamcast version it fades out gradually. This also affects many other sounds, which fade out in the Dreamcast version but get cut off abruptly in all other versions. Technically this isn’t a bug. The Dreamcast version’s sound system used sequenced sounds, and the fadeout was a side effect of it. Although the Gamecube version also uses a sequenced format, the fadeout side effect was disabled. The later ports dropped the sequenced format altogether so the sounds simply cut off.
  • In the cutscene where Knuckles attacks Sonic, Sonic says “Whoah!” before jumping backwards. It isn’t heard in SADX because Sonic’s soundbank is no longer loaded by that cutscene. At the same time this “fixes” the opposite problem in a similar cutscene in Tails’ story, where Tails says “Whoah!” in Sonic’s voice in the Dreamcast version.
  • A thud noise is missing when Sonic (or Tails) and Knuckles run into each other and drop the Chaos emeralds before Chaos 4 emerges.
  • The water splashes made by Chaos 4 are muffled by another sound that was mistakenly encoded as stereo, which interferes with the positional audio system and becomes too loud.
  • A skid noise when Beta backs up just before his first boss battle is missing.
  • A foreboding noise when ZERO’s shadow casts over Amy in the cutscene after Twinkle Park is missing.
  • The cutscenes in Amy and Gamma’s story where Gamma lets Amy escape load the wrong soundbank, which causes the cutscenes to play random unrelated sounds.
  • Bush rustling in the Angel Island hub no longer loops, although the sound is still there.
  • The rings that NiGHTS takes you through in Casinopolis’ NiGHTS pinball game no longer make a sound as you travel through them.
  • The bombs dropped by the airplanes in Ice Cap Act 3 no longer make a whistling sound as they fall down, and their explosions are silent.
  • In the original game the ring sound alternated between the left and the right channel panning every time you collected a ring, like in classic 2D games. While the effect is technically still there in SADX, its strength was reduced to the point of being almost inaudible.
  • In Sky Deck Act 2, Eggman’s announcements when the ship changes altitude (“Descending into the clouds. Slow the ship down!” or “Go up! Full speed ahead!”) are no longer heard because they were removed from the Sky Deck soundbank. The game still plays them if the sounds are put back into the soundbank.
  • The ambient machinery noise at the Mystic Ruins Final Egg base is missing. The noise sound was replaced by a single beep, and the function to play the noise was disabled in code, probably because the developers realized that the replacement was annoying. It’s unclear why the original sound was replaced.
  • Hot Shelter loads the wrong enemy soundbank, which makes enemies like the Egg Keepers play the sound of the ocean. This also affects the original game to a certain extent, but in the Dreamcast version those enemies are silent instead.

The Chao soundbanks were replaced in SADX because the Chao system itself was changed to be more like SA2B (see the Chao Gardens page). It’s hard to compare sounds directly because the soundbanks are different between SA1 and SADX. Nevertheless, there are some identical sounds that we can compare. Which one do you think sounds better?

Dreamcast

PC 2004

Although the game still has the code to play certain Chao sounds and jingles, SADX no longer plays them because the SA2B Chao soundbanks don’t have these sounds. An example of such missing jingles is the brief score you hear at the start of Chao Race.

Finally, let’s discuss the ADX playback issue in the Steam and Dreamcast Collection ports. Sound quality in the 2010 ports is undeniably the worst among all versions of the game. Unlike SADX Gamecube and PC 2004, these ports have the opposite problem with sound volume. The background noises drown out almost everything but the music (example: try playing Casino Act 1, where even the music is barely audible because of the gushing water noise).

While volume issues can be rectified somewhat by lowering the game’s overall sound effect volume in the launcher (in the Steam version that is), these sound effects are still lower quality than in the original PC port. The 2004 PC port uses WAV sound effects stored in DAT soundbanks, while the 2010 version uses the same soundbank format but with the sounds converted to ADX. Since ADX is a lossy format, the conversion resulted in quality loss.

There’s also something wrong with the way the newer port play these sounds, which could possibly be related to a decoding error. Here’s a sound from the E_0001 soundbank that plays when Chaos 0 is defeated. This is how it sounds if the ADX file is decoded with an old tool called adx2wav. It sounds like that ingame too:

And this is how it sounds when decoded with vgmstream:

The same sound from the 2004 port for comparison:

Apart from the playback issue, the quality of sound effects in the Steam version slightly worse than in the 2004 PC port, and many sound issues from the 2004 port remain unresolved.

The Gamecube version has an important advantage related to 3D sound effects. The original Dreamcast game uses QSound, a binaural sound effect that creates the impression of 3D sound with stereo headphones. The Gamecube version uses Dolby Pro Logic II for a 5.1 surround sound effect, and there are more 3D sounds than in the Dreamcast version, although not all of them play correctly. The 2004 PC version uses DirectSound3D for hardware accelerated 3D sound, but it doesn’t work too well from Windows Vista onwards. The Steam version appears to have broken 3D sound altogether.

For the modded PC version, the majority of these issues have been fixed. The Mod Loader implements support for ADX files using the BASS audio library, so you can install the ADX Audio mod for best quality music and voices. In 2022, the use of BASS was extended to sound effects, which enabled full positional audio support. For the Sound Overhaul mod, all sounds in the Dreamcast version (except Chao voices) were recorded in a format supported by the 2004 PC port with proper looping where necessary. The mod also adds processing and fadeout effects to several sounds, and restores most missing sounds. To learn more about mods for the PC version, visit the “Fixing the PC version of SADX” section on this blog.