Is it just me, or is AAI's sound quality a bit lacking, as far as the button sounds are concerned? At least compared to, say, Apollo Justice.

For example, when you hit the "save" button on the save screen, the "saving" sound sounds a bit scratchy and low quality compared to AJ's saving sound.

In addition, whenever I look at the red "next" or "play" button on the bottom screen, as well as some other things that are Egeworth's typical I tend to see these very faint, moving horizontal lines (I am not talking about the usual horizontal lines that are on the bottom screen for every other AA game.

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Generally comparing the AAI games music to AJ/AA's, the quality DOES seem to be noticeably low.

That's because AAI/AAI2's music producers/composers went into more orchestrated music instruments instead of electronic.

And if not implemented right, the orchestrated instruments will tend to sound much more awful/"low-fi" than it should be...The DS is wacky when it comes to that from my experience with the hardware. To be fair, they probably had to downsample a variety of said instruments so it wouldn't take much space in the DS cart.
Although there *are* a few games out there that has better sounding orchestra instruments playing correctly on the channels than AAI for sure...It seems to be a hit and miss with some producers.

I haven't paid too much attention to the button sounds, but I can take your word for it, since AAI/AAI2 is a really, REALLY bigger game than AJ and the old AA series. However, the recycled sounds that stem from the old AA/AJ games have retained their quality.


Source: Listening to OST, and listening to ripped sound files of the game.

With the amount of recycling that goes on from game to game it's no doubt that many aspects seem subpar - especially when this game is more or less the first to substantially deviate graphically and in terms of navigation. That of course meaning, the fact it's in 3rd person, and that there are true ENVIRONMENTS to interact with...in so many words.

That being said in the midst of all the 'newness' I'm not surprised these things would catch your eyes and ears. Musically Huddini pretty much said it, you've got to work up with electronic instrumentation or work down with orchestration ('acoustic music,') when it comes to the DS - it's in that awkward phase where it can't really play high quality digital music but it can do some impressive electronic stuff. (The 3DS though...that'd be tastealicious!)

I can't say I've noticed these things (and I'm a music producer!) but at the same time I'd never played with headphones or on my nice monitors as I sometimes do. Also with this AA game being the first with actual IMPROVEMENTS instead of the same sights and sounds on different backdrops, I was pretty preoccupied watching all the new animations and movements.

While the compositions are quite good (whether thought out or not) It doesn't seem that for this series Capcom throws their utmost care in the audio department.

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