Sample rate, compression, etc. all lead to a lack of dynamic range in the sound on TPA.
Isn't this true of the original DCS system though? The DCS system is monophonic, 16 bit, 31,250 sample rate, and compressed by a "factor of 10" using a proprietary compression scheme (that according to here is similar to the ol' Sony Minidisc compression system.) Music is "50-70 kbps", speech is "20-40 kbps"... compression algorithms differ but by modern MP3 standards that's very low...
I would be curious what differences you found... I don't know how Farsight is emulating this system. EG: Whether they are using data re-encoded from the above into a modern compression scheme, data exploded to lossless from the above, or are running the ROMs through an emulated version of the DCS compression algorithm. Perhaps some improvements could be made depending on what they are doing.
But this is what it is... the only way to get *really* dynamic sound would be if Bally/Williams still has the original studio files on those very dusty Mac Quadras somewhere...
They don't ROM emulate the sounds, instead playing back a "track" that has been recorded as a blob. This allows Farsight to use the music and sound calls as hooks for the goals in the game.
Definitely not idea then, especially for DCS games... compressing any music that's already been lossy compressed is going to have more artifacts and audio quality problems. Of course on mobile platforms this may be necessary to save space.
Frankly I haven't noticed audio quality issues with the PC release... perhaps they bumped up the quality to lossless for the PC release? (Or maybe it's just my ears. )
Bump. Any progress? Example of CV: (Note also that the menagerie ball behaves more like the cue ball in CBW.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32wGQyNDb9k