As I posted in my previous update, I now have a Super NES Mini! It’s a pretty cool little device.

I’ve noticed a few people wondering how the emulated audio stacks up against real hardware, so I made a few recordings to compare.

For the Classic Mini, the audio is taken from my AV Receiver directly into the line in on my PC. The real hardware SNES is my Super Famicom Jr with the optical audio output circuit I installed and detailed in a previous post – this ensures absolute crystal clear perfect audio directly from the SPC with zero noise or interference.

For an example of the audio captured directly from my real Super Famicom hardware via this lossless method I have some tracks from Chrono Trigger and DKC2 here:

Anyhow, onto the comparison:

For each track you will hear the Classic Mini first, then silence, then the real SNES:

So yeah…it’s damn close. The real hardware has the edge, but I’m not sure where the issues I’ve been reading up on of inaccurate sound have come from. I have a feeling poor audio setups are to blame for a lot of it (cheap soundbars, etc).

As for picture, there’s definitely a softness (likely due to 720p) and odd amount of noise with the SNES Classic Mini. It doesn’t come close to the sharpness (nor the input response time) of real hardware through the OSSC – and the colour accuracy isn’t as good either, but it’d be perfectly respectable for most users. My decent Huawei phone is sadly lost, so I’ve only got a poor quality camera for now…but I tried to get a couple of shots at least…

SNES Classic Mini:

Real Super Famicom/SNES via OSSC (with scanlines turned on)