> Ok, I know it's been explained before but for the life of me, I can't find the
> post..
>
> ...what differences between the GBA sound hardware and SPC700 exist that account
> for the noticeable inferiority in the quality of sound from the GBA in the SNES
> ports? Other than the speaker sucking, of course.

The SNES Audio Processing Unit has a DSP capable of mixing 8 channels in stereo, with gaussian resampling and a channel-toggled echo effect. The whole audio module was ahead of its time, really.

The GBA on the other hand mixes all of its sound in software, except for the Gameboy Color sound channels, and writes the result to a stereo digital-to-analog converter. The GBA processor isn't really powerful enough for a lot of polyphony or interpolated resampling or post-processing effects.

-nZero