(sorry about the photo quality, I did this with my mobile phone)
I can’t help it, whenever I have some audio mods to do, I always aim for the best parts.
Wima polypropylene caps are the Gucci of audio components, you really can’t beat them.
How does everything sound? Superb.
Wait and hear…
Hi everyone,
as you already know, our project aims at getting the best audio quality out of our favorite 16-bit games and in an effort to provide you the best sounding soundtracks while maintaining 100% accuracy towards original hardware, today our chain underwent another small but significative step forward:
The European Mega Drive Model 1, VA4, got replaced with a Japanese Mega Drive Model 1, V1.
What’s more, I believe that this MD was hardly used at all as all the components inside were in pristine condition and, as such, we can move another tiny step towards complete accuracy as I won’t need to change capacitors on this one, retaining the original ones.
Audio quality wise, the sound coming out of the VA1 (and VA0 and VA2 for that matter) is cleaner and with a harder hitting bass, although less muffled. This, on the first listen, might mislead the listener into thinking that there’s less bass than our previous MD: this is not true, it’s simply a cleaner and more controlled bass which I’m sure you’ll all come to love.
Anyway, life is not a bowl of cherries: the Japanese VA0, VA1 and VA2 were plagued with a design error in the amplifier section: the gain is too high (well, actually the problem is that the Reference Voltage -Vref- is too high) and due to this loud games might sound a bit distorted. This becomes quite evident in tracks that have a predominant bass line such as Boss 1 in Sonic 3D.
While a bit of background noise/hiss is tolerable, distortion is not welcome in our prestigious audiophile family, and as such I’ll make a small mod to lower the reference voltage thus fixing the distortion problem (I just need to put a bigger resistor, that’s pretty much it, no big deal).
EDIT: actually Vref is ok, it seems that the signal is too strong when getting into the amplifier chip. Thanks to the guys over at sega-16, especially Ace who came up with the fix in the first place!
This also mean that tomorrow I won’t be able to record a new release which will get shifted to the next week.
Also, I do believe this is the right moment to talk about the Remasters I wanted to do: our recording chain underwent a lot of changes and we’ve got really far since the first release, Sonic 2.
At this point I feel the urge to start doing these remasters as the quality have changed quite a bit and I was thinking of modifying our release schedule this way:
Most voted request -> Oldest request -> Most voted -> Oldest -> Remaster -> Most voted -> etc…
Every two cycles I’ll put a remaster in so that requests will also have priority.
Oh, and from now on, if you want you can also request a Remaster!
Just put it this way in the request thread:
[REMASTER] Game name
so I’ll immediately recognize it and when the time comes to release a remaster, I’ll take the most voted one.
And that’s pretty much it, maybe I’ll post some photos of the new Mega Drive later and update our Equipment page!
Stay tuned!!
Most of you will probably be like “what the hell happened?!?!?” and I can’t really blame you for it.
The restyling completely inverted the color scheme and now we have a clean, pure snow white background with easy-on-the-eye dark grey text.
Also, gone are the cluttered menu, the giant banner and other unaesthetical things.
A quick heads up on how to find your way around the new website:
Still, everything is new and pretty much untested.
If you find something which doesn’t work or have suggestions on making the website more pleasant, please let me know in the Forum or at [email protected]
Thank you for sticking with us and hopefully I’ll be recording a new release next week!
The 19th of October marked our second year running this project… and I completely forgot about it!
I guess I was too busy recording the new release to notice, which will be out by the end of this week (if everything goes according to plan – which never does).
I’ll update this post this night with some insights and random thoughts about where we are now and where I want the project to be in the future.
Stay tuned and check back for more!
UPDATE:
Alright, here we go.
What happened this year?
I really don’t want to go round in circles and I’m getting straight to the point: this year the project sucked.
If you remember last year’s post, I was putting the goal of releasing a total of 30 game soundtracks by making 3 each month.
I don’t even want to go back and see how many I managed to get out, I’m not even sure we managed to get out 10.
So… what happened?
Real life happened, work, study, personal matters, all kind of stuff got in the way and whenever I had to chose between investing time in something that could help my career/future or get down and record a new release, I always chose the first.
Hell, sometimes it even happened that I finally had a day off where I could record the release but I almost always found myself slacking on my sofa, playing some games (I have more than 200 games on Steam and have played only 4 or 5 so far) and go out for a walk/playing with friends.
This said, my priorities have been set and I’m sorry to acknowledge that this project is slipping to the bottom fast.
I don’t want to make promises anymore because I know I won’t be be able to keep them.
But one thing I know: no matter how slowly we’re going to proceed, I’m never gonna stop until I’ve reached our goal.
Where are we now?
Still, awesome things happened.
Now we have two new awesome partners, RadioSEGA and Caverns of Hope.
I talked about them in another post some weeks ago.
Having partners means that the project keeps expanding, gaining more followers and letting people know of other projects which are affiliated in some way to ours. That’s something I like and I’d love to do more: finding other projects similar to our and expanding our network not only to maximize reach, but to offer our community more quality content provided by other people.
This leads us to the final point…
Where are we going?
I’d love to expand the project and make it embrace retrogaming in a more general way.
I’d like to create a “hub”, a new website, a retrogaming network which will constantly provide you with retrogaming quality content, be them news, articles, music, pictures, video and so on.
An example: yesterday night I was watching AlexKroft, a streamer on Twitch.tv which was playing the unreleased Resident Evil 1.5 beta which had been fixed by some guy and is now almost completely playable (not the Magic Zombie Door one by Team IGAS, for those following the scene, it was a new fix).
It was an awesome experience witnessing how far Capcom went into developing this game before scrapping it for what eventually became Resident Evil 2.
As such, I’d really want to write an article on it but I realize this is no place for it as we’re mainly focused on music from 16 bits console, but I think that there are actually lots of people who would be interested in this.
What’s more, it’s been more than a month that I’ve setup my personal Twitch channel and now I’m waiting for a new Jap Mega Drive to arrive so I can mod it with S-Video output and start streaming some retrogaming goodness with good quality.
This is another project I always had on my mind: making a “team” of streamers dedicated to streaming retrogaming content for our community.
As a note, bear in mind that all this expansion means that I won’t always be directly involved and neither our staff.
We are dedicated only to the 16-bit audiophile project and always be, our main priority will be putting out the highest quality soundtracks of the web.
I’d just probably “keep an eye open” in our network to make sure that content quality is always high and our community is satisfied with the work and that would be pretty much it.
Anyway, enough of my ramblings, I think I made my ideas clear enough about the direction I want to undertake: expand our network embracing more aspects of the retrogaming world.
When it’s gonna happen? No clue.
Will it happen?? Same.
I’ll leave this open for discussion.
And that’s all!
Thank you all for sticking with us so far and stay tuned for the next release!
Today I’ve wasted an entire day trying to get the new version of Audacity working but it seems it has a strange bug where the audio recorded is full of crackles while in monitoring mode. This didn’t happen with the previous version so I had to find the old version and do a rollback.
Now it’s all good and I’ll start recording the new release tomorrow.
Stay tuned!
