I've been revisiting some classic games lately, and while I love the Sega Genesis library, I can't help but find its sound chip a bit grating. There's something about the harsh, metallic tones and often scratchy quality that makes it hard to enjoy games at full volume. I know it has its fans, but compared to systems like the SNES or even some older consoles, it just seems unnecessarily rough.
Am I alone in this? Does anyone else struggle with the Genesis' audio, or is this part of its charm for you?
The Genesis sound hardware is/was extremely simple compared to some of its contemporaries and the exact hardware (or at least the behavior of said hardware) changed over the oodles of revisions of the consoles over time. In particular, basically all of its music is produced via FM synthesis and if you want wavetable-ish tunes like the SNES can generate you have to write your own music engine in software. Because of this a lot of developers used the GEMS sound engine as-is, which to be fair really does kind of sound like crap.
Furthermore, the first generation of discrete YM2612 FM synthesis chips used had a known bug in their output (low volume distortion) that some games deliberately took advantage of in their audio either due to cheekiness or the assumption that it was intended behavior. This is probably where the "first run Genesis sounds better" canard comes from. It probably also didn't help that some of Sega's own published documentation on this chip was incorrect.
Later revisions of the machines used FM synthesis hardware integrated into their ASICs in different incarnations, and of course the exact hardware used in the clone systems, not to mention the behavior of emulation, is all over the damn place. This may or may not make any particular game sound like crap but it can certainly make them sound different. It's not that the Genesis has hard to emulate audio hardware, per se, but it's that nobody can really agree on what the "canonical" setup is supposed to be including developers of games during the system's original lifetime.