February 9, 2026
Team Crunch vs. Team Clean
Game Boy Advance Audio Interpolation
Gamers split: keep that crunchy GBA vibe or smooth it out
TLDR: A new emulator trick smooths GBA audio by resampling it, cutting harsh buzzing across all games. The comments are split between loving the cleaner sound and defending the original “crunch” as the console’s soul, reigniting the authenticity vs. upgrade debate.
An emulator dev just showed off a way to make Game Boy Advance music sound cleaner by smoothing out the harsh, buzzy edges—cue instant comment section civil war. In a Metroid: Zero Mission demo, the “clean” version sounded a bit softer, but way less screechy. That’s when Team Crunch rolled in. User dleslie swore the original grit gives the beat “emotional energy,” while joefourier argued the jagged artifacts actually add “fake” high-end detail our ears expect. Bitcraft sealed the vibe check: the crispy aliasing is a cozy signature—like the PlayStation 1’s wobbly polygons—and calling it “broken” feels rude.
Team Clean came prepared. Dietrichepp praised this as an easy, universal upgrade: unlike NanoBoyAdvance’s fancy MP2K HQ (which only works on certain games), this smoothing works across the whole library. They also explained why old games didn’t aim higher quality: the GBA’s clunky audio buffers made it hard to keep samples flowing, so devs went low-rate and called it a day. MBCook chimed in with a dev confession: audio is notoriously hard to emulate—respect to anyone who makes it work. The consensus ending? Give us a toggle. Let purists keep the crunch, let audiophiles flip to silky mode, and let the rest of us argue in the comments while we boot VBA-M for another round.
Key Points
- •The post proposes replacing GBA hardware’s nearest-neighbor resampling with emulator-side interpolation to reduce aliasing and noise.
- •GBA outputs mixed audio via PWM at 4 selectable rates (32768–262144 Hz), with most games using 65536 Hz; nearest-neighbor resampling causes noticeable aliasing, especially with low-rate PCM (~10–14 kHz).
- •A general interpolation approach can work for any GBA game, unlike features like NanoBoyAdvance’s MP2K HQ, which only apply to MP2K/M4A/Sappy-driven titles.
- •Per-channel source sample rates are computed from GBA timer reload values and clock dividers using a 16,777,216 Hz base clock; recalculation is needed when timer settings or tracking change.
- •If a channel tracks a disabled timer, it continuously outputs the last FIFO sample; cascading mode is theoretically supported, but the author falls back to nearest-neighbor in that case.