Hollow sound recordings

[MAHAMA ②⓪②⓪]

I can forgive the fact that Pinball Arcade uses pre-recorded sound samples rather than real-time emulation, but what’s up with the sound quality of a few of the Williams games? Pinbot, Black Knight 2000, and Whirlwind all sound hollow, like they were recorded by holding a microphone up to a speaker.

[MWink64]

I've noticed this as well. Some tables sound fantastic, while others sound terrible. The old Pinball Hall of Fame version of PinBot sounded great, yet the TPA version is awful.

[phoerber]

The pre-DCS titles like those mentioned above were all games that used CVSD technology and they sound somewhat like that in real life too.... Talk about getting the rowboat to do 90, WMS really got a ton out of very limited technology at the time. Those guys were super geniuses. DCS was a major step up and the difference really shows up here in TPA.

[MAHAMA ②⓪②⓪]

Originally posted by phoerber:

The pre-DCS titles like those mentioned above were all games that used CVSD technology and they sound somewhat like that in real life too....

No way. Black Knight 2000, like several other Willaims pinball machines and including a few arcade games they produced (High Impact Football, NARC, Smash T.V.), use a Yamaha 2151 synthesizer and a pair of DACs for music. CVSD was only used for voice and other digitized sound effects. While CVSD’s sound quality is rather poor, it’s not related to the quality of Pinball Arcade’s music output.

I’m not against compressed sound per say, but DCS produced horrible artifacts. In my opinion, the BSMT 2000[en.wikipedia.org] hardware designed by Brian Schmidt (who incidentally composed the music for Black Night 2000 and several other Williams games) provided the best sounding pinball machines.

But back on topic, here’s a sample of music from Black Knight played back via MAME[tindeck.com].

Now here’s the playback from Pinball Arcade[tindeck.com]

Elvira and the Party Monsters (Bally) and Taxi (Williams) also use the same audio hardware (YM2151, DAC, CVSD) as Black Knight 2000 and Whirlwind, yet it's those last 2 that sound hollow, again, like they were recorded in the worst possible way, by holding a microphone to a spearker. Same hardware, vastly different levels of output quality. The question is, why?

[Bruno]

What really bug me are the flipper and physics sounds, which are just aweful and unrealistic. Compare them to the real thing (a youtube video of a table we have on TPA for example), it's pretty obvious.

[phoerber]

Thanks for the clarification, and what a differencre in quality with the MAME sample WOW! I agree the big question is WHY? Pinball is so much about the aural experience for me,and probably you too! I wonder why more thought and effort doesn't go into the sound package design these days.

You're absolutely correct. the FM synthesizer OPL2 made music, CVSD generated speech and other noises came from an 8 bit D/A converter. The CVSD was used on games like Millionaire, Cyclone, Swords of Fury, Banzai Run, Earthshaker, Space Station, Pinbot, yes?

Also, wasn't Dan Forden the music composer on BK2K?

Are there any good sights you'd reccomend for other pinball sound junkies like me?

Originally posted by Big_Jojo_大周周:

Originally posted by phoerber:

The pre-DCS titles like those mentioned above were all games that used CVSD technology and they sound somewhat like that in real life too....

No way. Black Knight 2000, like several other Willaims pinball machines and including a few arcade games they produced (High Impact Football, NARC, Smash T.V.), use a Yamaha 2151 synthesizer and a pair of DACs for music. CVSD was only used for voice and other digitized sound effects. While CVSD’s sound quality is rather poor, it’s not related to the quality of Pinball Arcade’s music output.

I’m not against compressed sound per say, but DCS produced horrible artifacts. In my opinion, the BSMT 2000[en.wikipedia.org] hardware designed by Brian Schmidt (who incidentally composed the music for Black Night 2000 and several other Williams games) provided the best sounding pinball machines.

But back on topic, here’s a sample of music from Black Knight played back via MAME[tindeck.com].

Now here’s the playback from Pinball Arcade[tindeck.com]

Elvira and the Party Monsters (Bally) and Taxi (Williams) also use the same audio hardware (YM2151, DAC, CVSD) as Black Knight 2000 and Whirlwind, yet it's those last 2 that sound hollow, again, like they were recorded in the worst possible way, by holding a microphone to a spearker. Same hardware, vastly different levels of output quality. The question is, why?