Bad Quality ("Canned") sound for certain games?

[Boxes]

I apologize if this has been answered somewhere, but this is the first problem I've never found a definitive answer for anywhere by searching and thus I create my account at last to ask for help.

I've been having a problem with a couple games, the main one being "God Hand", and another being "Resident Evil 4". They have what I like to called "canned" sound - it's sound that is low quality and absolutely sounds artificial. The best thing I could compare it to would be like hearing the game through a telephone or from a cheap cell phone ring tone.

Cutscenes will play flawlessly with their normal sound quality, but once in-game, the sound quality plummets. However, if in mid-game there's a cutscene using the in-game engine, the sound quality returns to normal.... or at least close to it. It doesn't make the game unplayable, but it's mildly frustrating and only happens on those two games that I have taken the time to covert for PC use.


I've tried all manners of fiddling with levers and dials and knobs and such - I've tried all the plugins, changed my sound settings for my headphones, tried everything.

SPU2-X 1.1.0 - all manner of sound settings seem to be the same, Cubic interpolation (iirc) tends to have SLIGHTLY better quality but still bad
SPU2-X 1.2.0 - exactly the same as 1.1.0
Other sound plugins - No sound at all, or very scratchy sound (unplayable)

Disabling speed hacks, looking for patches (apparently the game encounters something when starting, but says THIS IS NOT A bug), etc all does nothing. I've heard of other people getting these games (specifically, God Hand) to run "flawlessly". Am I doing something wrong?

I've yet to try the Beta build for testing, but I lack access to the computer at the moment.

Specs (if that matters)
OS: Win Vista 64-bit, latest updates
GFX: nVidia 9800 GT 196.21 (anxiously awaiting fixed version of latest drivers)
Sound: Realtek HD Audio, I use my Logitch G35 Headset, though
CPU: (from memory) Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 @ 2.66Ghz
RAM: 6 GB
PCSX2 Version: Latest stable release (9.6.0, not the beta, I'll add rev. number if I get access to the computer with it)

[rama]

I'll look at it, got Resident Evil 4 here.

[Shadow Lady]

The way you describe it sounds just like a problem when FPS is lower than normal, do you get lower FPS when this happens?

[Boxes]

There are some FPS drops here and there, but I can look at an empty space, get 100% 60 FPS, and still get the same, poor quality sound. It's not really stuttering, it's just poor quality.

For example, with Katamari Damacy, I get some good slowdowns playing that especially when the camera zooms WAYYY OUT, but the sound quality is the same as if I'm just starting a level at full FPS.


Also a fine example, FFX had terrible graphical bugs for me until I keyed the settings just right, with weird blurring and from the beginning, the game had poor FPS (my first game I tried with the emulator, just starting out), but the sound quality was in key with what it would be had you bought the game the day it were released and played it on the console itself.

I have tried lowering the graphics settings enough to get a consistent 100% for FPS but to no avail, anyway.

[Shadow Lady]

Is it possible you can make a recording of the sound problem? God hand sounds fine for me with SPU2-X.

[Boxes]

Yeah, but you might have to wait a day or so since the computer's been defragging and being cleaned up all day.

I'll tune up fraps (or try out the in-game recorder for once) and upload a short video (i'll probably set it to low FPS to trim the file size). I'll just upload it to a media sharing site as well as youtube because I'll likely delete the video off youtube in a month or so and it's nice to have a backup. Considering God Hand has a fairly short intro movie then goes straight into action, it'll be easy to demonstrate good quality vs bad.

But again, it'll probably have to wait until tomorrow. Hopefully I don't forget.

[rama]

Ok, a >high quality< recording of the good versus bad sounds would be awesome.
I can provide a special developer version of SPU2-X (devel build) that allows dumping the generated sound directly to wav.
If you compress that to mp3 at 320kb/s, it'd be small enough to share.
Youtube or generally doing a video won't work as well, since the audio codecs employed by these will make the recording useless.

Edit:
I just did some comparisons between the different interpolation modes SPU-X offers.
Out of the 3, don't use linear. It really degrades the sound a lot.
Nearest and Cubic currently sound exactly the same (prolly bugged).
So I guess it's best you use Nearest.

[Boxes]

That sounds pretty fancy, but I just made a recording using the Zero SPU2 plugin (ZeroSPU2 r-514Dev 0.4.6). Apparently, while recording, it actually was playing sound, unless while testing the plugin yesterday I messed up my headphones because it was around the time I gave up.

It's probably not as clean as the devel build of the other codec's recorder, but I felt it demonstrated my problem well enough and in fairly similar quality levels

http://www.mediafire.com/?ojjjlkz0h50
(Excuse the really rapid menu switching sound in the beginning, my controller was bugging out because I tapped the Home key and the recording starts there because I exited out)

Things that seem normal quality:
- Cutscene audio
- The "Clover" intro to the game (not captured)
- You'll hear an item drop (assuming you've played the game and know what it sounds like) after I defeat 3 enemies and then Gene whistling, shortly after that, you'll hear a minion speak "Hey-ohhh!" - his little sound clip there is in normal (good) quality, otherwise he changed back to bad quality
- Background music

Things that seem to be in poor quality:
- Normal gameplay/Combat audio (Fine example: "Nervous?" soon after I skip the cutscene and later in the clip)
- After the guy mentioned above has his audio clip, he falls down. The sound played for people falling down is in low quality.
- Gene's audio when selecting difficulty "That's what I expected from you"
- Menu switching and selecting sounds

[Image: 99ge8j.jpg]

I'm sorry if that's not enough information, but if you need any more I can supply it.

[Boxes]

So yeah, it's been a couple days. Topic hasn't gone down the list much but I'm just wondering if there's any idea on what to do or if there's any progress on something else.

I know I was told to use Nearest/Cubic but it's still not that great.

I've seen a forum post where someone said they ran it "flawlessly". I would've contacted him but apparently it's a year old post on another forum and archived, and he doesn't use those forums anymore. Haven't found him anywhere else. I can't even find the link to the topic on google anymore.

I don't even know if anyone else has the problem so I don't have anyone to compare specs/settings with. Blarg.

[Shadow Lady]

Well GodHand still sounded pretty much the same as in the PS2 for me, so no idea how to help when it works fine really, I use SPU2-X with no interpolation. Also you did a recording with ZeroSPU2 (which you had discarded already) when we were discussing SPU2-X so that doesn't really help either :p