PlayStation Vs. N64: How They Matched Up In 9 Crucial Areas
3. Music To Our Ears
Yes, we know they fill you with a fuzzy sense of nostalgia, but cartridges were the Big N’s downfall on the audio front - the N64’s sonic output was never going to compete with CD-quality sound, no matter how beefy your TV speakers happened to be.
The PlayStation was backed by a dedicated sound chip and hardware level H.261 decoding, which translates in English as the machine delivered an almighty audial thump with minimal system overhead.
The N64, with no sound chip under the hood, was almost a step down from the 16-bit SNES from a sound perspective, although it didn’t stop the likes of Rare from producing some lovely compositions and Nintendo’s own arrangements in games like Mario 64 and Zelda are still stuck in our heads today.
However, most developers struggled with the obstacles like speech compression and cursed Ninty’s decision to cling to a dying storage format. How could the N64 challenge a machine that doubled as a high-quality CD player where our ears were concerned?