@birdmanager6 - Despite his English errors, I can understand exactly what he's talking about. You know, he wants us to compare the sound samples of both versions(in this case, SNES and GBA).
Pick any GBA port of a SNES game. Let's say I compare one music of Earthbound as played on the SNES versus said music that is played on Mother 1+2(which is a GBA port). Do you notice something different between them? If yes, then congratulations you've got two versions of the same soundtrack! Now take off your "pretend glasses" and see the obvious here.
SNES and GBA cannot sound the same for one simple reason:
SNES has a full fledged sound IC, that has 8 voices, 32 kHz mixing rate, 16-bit precision and operates with the BRRPCM encoding for samples.
GBA has no sound hardware. The ARM7 CPU is tied to a dumb line driven DAC and samples are bitbanged into it. 8-bit precision and the most common audio driver for the GBA works off of 8-bit PCM.
It's physically impossible for anything on the GBA to sound even remotely like the SNES (or even the Genesis\MegaDrive for that matter)
I prefer the sound on the ps1 version. There are some tracks I liked on the snes version but can't remember names. I tend to forget there's a gba version for obvious reasons.
I think it's a bit extreme to say that GBA ports (or remakes or whatever) can't sound remotely the same. The system certainly lacks the ability to faithfully reproduce the original pounding FM sound or crisp sample presentation, but for many people, the right sound setup will come decently close to the originals. Alternatively or additionally, the wrong setup may cause them to not hear the strengths of the original hardware.
I'm pretty sure none of the GBA releases of 16-bit era games have particularly impressive sound design, but they're for the most part quite functional, and I imagine that many of the most important aspects (which lay in their composition) ultimately carried over.
Come to think of it, I haven't examined Bregalad's "sound restoration" hacks for FF IV-VI GBA. Anyone here have an opinion on those?
The only GBA title that sounds remotely like a playstation in audio quality was Golden Sun, and that game rapes your battery life.
You pretty much have to devote alot of CPU time and carefully written code to make audio on the GBA actually sound good. Even still you're stuck with the poor precision of the dumb DAC unit.
8 bit PCM, and usually limited to 11-16KHz mixing rate, and often not using interpolation when resampling the sounds to the mix rate.
Add higher mixing rate, maybe up to 22KHz, and you double the CPU time spent on mixing. Throw in linear interpolation, and you've got maybe 1.5-2x the CPU time.
Meanwhile, the SNES and PS1 had dedicated mixer chips, with ADPCM compressed samples that produced a relative precision of 16 bits per sample, with some minor noise introduced in the compression process. Mixed at 16 bit output precision. Resampled in hardware using a four point interpolation algorithm mostly resembling Gaussian curve, designed to reduce the ADPCM noise, so I've heard. And mixing rates of 32000Hz and 44100Hz, respectively.
The GBA can only barely approach the SNES, but depending on how good your hearing is, you may not quite notice the low quality.
@AnonRunzes Actually, I was asking if people actually thought the GBA and SNES versions of FFVI's soundtrack sounded the same, or if FFVI Advance was another of the games like Legacy of Goku II or Medabots AX Rokusho/Metabee where there's just no native format rip available because we don't know how to do that, yet. Of course, it could always be because people think it would be redundant, in which case I would disagree.
Apparently FFVI GBA uses the Sappy engine, which is good because it means I could rip it with GBAMusRiper. I guess it was just a matter of nobody else feeling like doing it. Either way, I've uploaded it here if you want it.
I'm assuming the rip wasn't done on FFVI Advance because it's deemed by the Final Fantasy community that the SNES version easily had the superiour audio anyways (Especially with the fact that restoration patches were released for the GBA games to fix graphical and audio issues and try restoring the SNES-like graphics and sound). In that respect, I'm actually inclined to agree, because the GBA has such terrible hardware for playing back audio, although ROM Hackers have been working to improve the GBA M4A engine:
This page is from Pokecommunity and displays a hacked M4A ("Sappy") engine, which has been improved and samples don't sound like crap anymore. It's a bit of an assembly hack, but with the right tooling it should be compatible with any GBA games that make use of this engine.