Returning to a post from a few years ago to address something.
Ow. My ears.
I recently found a small cache of songs (~300) recorded from video games... all on the Sinclair Spectrum.
As mentioned earlier the Spectrum didn't have a dedicated sound chip (at least in the early models, no clue about the later models released by Amstrad) so it was always going to be a challenge to make it play decent music.
After having listened to about half of those tracks, I conclude that the Spectrum's music capabilities are just a couple of steps above that of a feminist modem. There are very few good tunes in there, and the ones I do find I can find in better quality on other systems such as the Amstrad CPC, and that's saying something.
That actually got me thinking whether there's a piece of music out there that sounds best on the Spectrum. That could only be the case if it was from a Spectrum exclusive title... but with the Spectrum having 27.000+ titles in its library I'm not going to spend further time trying to find an answer to that question.
Update on this: I accidentally stumbled across a case where the Spectrum was playing better music than other contemporary platforms - and made a very interesting discovery.
This is the top-down racer L.E.D. Storm, released in the arcades in 1987. Note that there's a soundtrack.
I owned this game on the Amstrad CPC and distinctly remembered that it had no music, only SFX.
Then I came across this:
WTF, why does the Spectrum version have a soundtrack and the Amstrad one doesn't? (Please ignore the fact that the Spectrum-tune is different from the arcade one, the composer just threw out the OST and made his own.)
So I started digging, and learned that just before Amstrad bought out Spectrum a 'Spectrum 128'-model had been released in Spain, which featured a whopping 128kb of RAM. It also came with something no other Spectrum-computer had: Its very own soundchip! The same one that the Amstrad CPC used, to be precise. After the acquisition Amstrad released the Spectrum +2, which was heavily based on the Spectrum 128, but this meant that the Spectrum and the Amstrad were now identical in many ways.
One notable difference regarded backwards compatibility. Predecessors to the Spectrum 128 only had 48kb of memory, while the Amstrad had the 464-model with 64kb of memory, and the 6128-model had 128kb. To ensure backwards compatibility and allow the Spectrum to use its new banks of RAM, Spectrum-coders would often have the games check the hardware; if they found 128kb of memory they'd run the game as intended, but if only 48kb was found then the music would be skipped. Meanwhile, Amstrad-coders... didn't do any such thing. 64kb was enough to run both the game and the music, so no one saw a reason to 'reward' 6128-users with extra frills... especially since a large portion of Amstrad-releases were just lazy Spectrum ports, post-acquisition.
An excellent example of this is the platformer Auf Wiedersehen Monty. This is what the game sounds like on a Spectrum with only 48kb of RAM (and the infamous Internal Beeper):
But with 128kb RAM and the sound chip, it played this instead:
This sounds pretty close to the C-64 version. Note the extended intro, and the drums at 0:38.
Now let's take a look at the CPC-version:
Hang on, where's the intro and the drums? What's going on here?
What's going on is that even though the Spectrum and the Amstrad have the same soundchip, and therefore should be playing the tune identically, that's not happening. The AY-soundchip only has three channels, and in the case of the Amstrad version they hard-dedicated one of those to SFX, leaving only two for the music. Meanwhile the Spectrum uses all three channels
and the extra memory, meaning a better musical performance.
What this means, is that the odds of finding a Spectrum-game playing good music with the Internal Beeper is quite low, but finding a Spectrum-game playing good music with 128kb of memory and the AY-soundchip is quite high, as it automatically has an advantage over Amstrad's entire CPC-line! If an Amstrad game released after 1986 plays a tune well, odds are good that the Spectrum can do it better. I've already found several examples of this, like Chase H.Q.. It's considered one of the best Amstrad-conversions around, but the Spectrum version
sounds better.
This is making me rethink many things about the ZX Spectrum. Maybe you can find a good tune in there as well.