Force Stereo audio in Majora's Mask 3D? Is it possible? by ostbso at 12:43 PM EDT on August 11, 2018
While Ocarina of Time 3D has both surround (which makes the audio sound compressed/washed out) and stereo audio, Majora's Mask 3D seems to always sound like if the console's audio is always set to Surround (even when set on Stereo). With Smash Bros 3DS something similar also happens, the audio sounds low quality (probably to save space in cartdrige), but it is possible to mod that game to import sound files with better quality, and it works perfectly (meaning that the only reason it did not sound well was because of the audio files in the game).
However, I took a look into Majora's Mask 3D SFX files and compared them to those of Ocarina of Time 3D and.. the SFX both games share sound exactly the same, no quality downgrade or anything like that. Even Link's sounds in Majora's Mask 3D sound pretty high quality, unlike, ironically, how it sounds in the game itself.
So I came with the idea that maybe the game forces the console to output Surround audio. But, is that even possible? Maybe there's a byte in the "exefs" or even in one of the ".bcsar" files that forces the console to output Surround audio, instead of what the user has set on their console (in my case, Stereo).
Thanks in advance. Surprisingly, I have never seen anybody complain about this.. I hope we can make Majora's Mask 3D sound like Ocarina of Time 3D in terms of audio quality.
While I can't speak for the sound effects, Majora's Mask 3D differs from Ocarina of Time 3D in that the music is entirely streamed, whereas OoT actually used sequences like the original (probably due to Hyrule Field). The problem with this is that they applied the laziest, worst-sounding reverb I've ever heard to them, making them sound like garbage. The only way around this would be to make our own custom bcstms to replace them, which is plenty possible, but it would be a lot of work.
Also, I'm fairly sure it would be impossible for a game to force surround when the console is set to stereo--it wouldn't make any sense for game settings to be able to override console settings. Just as a fun little tidbit related to this, Pokemon X/Y will output mono audio unless the 3DS is set to surround (not stereo, surround).
Yeah. The music's reverb sounds really awful. As you said, the songs can be replaced with other high quality renditions of the songs easily (although one would need to re-record all the midis and add a proper reverb so it has better quality (like how midis in Ocarina of Time 3D sound in comparison to the original OoT).
I know it sound crazy that they can force a specific sound setting for a game, but maybe they needed to do the change so the SFX could sound right when comparing to the lower quality streamed music. Having stereo SFX but lower quality streamed music could sound pretty strange, which might justify this change (if that's the case).
Anyways, what you told about the Pokemon X/Y game might have something to do with this. I have been looking into the BCSAR documentation on the Internet, but I can't find any useful information regarding this problem. I've also been comparing real quick the BCSAR files from MM3D and OoT3D, but everything seems different to me in both games...
Source of thee problem + fix patch! by Hqwepiy at 2:26 PM EDT on August 6, 2021
As it turns out, the game LITERALLY forces Surround sound by default!
This mod fixes the problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ehZ1Eee3lPQ
Maybe this could be used as a base to fix the problems regarding Pokemon X/Y :P