Reply 20 of 26, by NewRisingSun
wrote:As I recall, I was always composing on a Soundblaster card of some kind
I understand that I am supposed to take this at face value because it is from the composer himself, but this seems like utter nonsense. I would say he is substituting actual knowledge with an extrapolation of extremely vague memories ("a Soundblaster card of some kind", how precise). Maybe he connected an SC-55 to the Sound Blaster MIDI interface, or maybe he did check on OPL2 that it did not sound obviously wrong, but that does not mean that OPL2 is the optimal configuration.
Hexen included CD tracks recorded from a Roland SC-55 --- that is contemporaneous evidence indicating that Kevin Schilder used a Sound Canvas to compose that soundtrack, and I see no reason to believe that he would have operated differently for Heretic. Please listen to the OPL2 soundtracks of Heretic and Hexen (logged with 18 voices and stereo as played on an OPL3 card when running the game with the correct command-line parameters) to discover how utterly awful the FM instruments are. Ghastly. Whoever thinks that these mixes are "well-balanced" is nuts. That the SC-55 has polyphony dropouts with some songs means nothing other than a lack of care in MIDI editing. MT-32 game soundtracks have polyphony dropouts all the time, yet nobody questions that they were composed for MT-32.
If you want to argue about what subjectively sounds right, then I will strongly represent the side that SC-55 sounds right, and for every seeming imperfection you can point out on the SC-55, you can find two on any other device, including FM. Should you put up modified recordings adjusting the files according to someone's loopy opinion on what he thinks sounds right ("loopy" referring not to you, but to some genius on that doomworld thread complaining that the SC-55's choir sounds "cheesy"), then I shall offer competing proper recordings from unmodified MIDI files (while recording high-polyphony tracks in two passes and then mixing them together).