Never thought I could fit so many acronyms in one sentence, did you?

Are the original SNES chiptune OSTs of FFIV, V, and VI still better than their successors on the DS, or do the DS tunes trump the ol' SNES tunes?

I miss the old FFIV, V, and VI music, so...yeah.

OPINIONS! Please!

Well, only FFIV has been remade for the DS so far, although all games have been remade for the Game Boy Advance. I thought that Square Enix did an overall good job implementing the GBA scores; loss of sound quality was minimised if still inevitable. I actually found the downgraded tFFIV DS score more problematic than its SNES and GBA releases -- the audio was massively undermined by the technical ambitions of the game and just sounds superficial to me. The actual Final Fantasy IV Original Soundtrack, featuring the non-downgraded DS arrangements, wasn't a particularly bothersome release even if I still felt some of the implementation left much to be desired.

As Chris mentioned, the IV, V and VI ports were made for GBA, which has much weaker sound processing power than the SNES did; so, it's no real surprise that the SNES versions sound much better than the GBA versions (though, also like Chris said, they did a good job retaining as much quality as was possible with GBA).

It might not be so cut-and-dry comparing FFIV SNES to FFIV DS, though most opinions I've heard have been unfavorable of the latter. To me, the SNES synth still trumps the DS--even if less crisp and more limited, it just sounds much richer to me.

SNES >> DS >> GBA >> Xbox360 (kidding)

I'll always have a soft spot for the SNES sound chip and what it was capable of.  It seemed like there was less technical limitations, so artists could still express what they wanted to, even if it was toned down a bit.  Again, it's all about composers knowing how the technology works, and then using that to their advantage and let's face it, Square kind of ruled the SNES.

I like the old FFIV OSV better than the DS release. It's also my personal opinion that if Lost Odyssey was done through a SFC soundchip it would have been the best OST released in the past 12 years or so.

???

Why, what do you think is wrong with Lost Odyssey?! I just bought that!!

It's decent, but I'm not too crazy about the overall feel of the album. There are some strong compositions hindered by poor percussion and some iffy samples (from what I remember, at least). There's nothing "wrong" with it, I would just rather hear it through a SFC chip.

fix'd and second'd.

Word.  SONY SPC700 4 LIFE

-Mike

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Much agreed.

As far as I'm concerned, the best thing that Sony ever did for gaming.

Yes, yes and yes.

It's pretty funny when you consider it's just a simple 8 channel sample player with unfathomable small amounts of sample RAM (less than 64kB, but it could be ADPCM compressed so I guess about 200-300 kB in all).
Yes, it had a DSP but all the later sample playing chips had one as well.

Sony's SPU is the direct descendant of SPC700, sporting 3 times more channels and 8 times more sample RAM (still supporting ADPCM). And most of the sequenced stuff done there sounds piss poor compared to SNES music (notable exceptions include Chrono Cross and Racing Lagoon (and Onimusha on PS2, but that's another story)).

I guess having more restraints imposed by the hardware forced the composers to be more creative with their work, while PSX era hardware allowed for using their whole, unedited MIDI soundfont (either with sequences, or when the RAM wasn't sufficient, with streams/redbook).