How Sweet the Sound

These days portable music is pretty much ubiquitous in the industrialized world. Where as at the begining of the decade most people had never heard of an i-pod, and most of the world did not own portable music players also known as digital audio players or daps for short. Yet now everywhere you look people have some portable device with their music stored jamming out while they are out and about. This has even trickled down to the portable gaming arena with devices like the PSP being music players out the box. People relish at the idea of being to load up some mass quanity of songs that they can take everywhere.

What often gets overlooked however is how far we've come in terms of quality over the years as people usually just relish at the quanity and general idea of it all. This quality idea carries over though from just the sound quality and performance of the audio files and players to the sound quality that appears in today's mobile gaming. It is often criminally overlooked at the current juncture though.

This could be partly due to the fact that the DS up until this point has been a music player out of the box, does not come with headphones, and has had rather mediocre sound output from the stock set of speakers in the DS Lite. The PSP speakers while a definite step hardly do the extra sound punch of the PSP any justice either.

Yet with the advent of some really descent cheap yet quality really portable headphones over teh past few years such as the Koss KSC-75 or Sennheiser PX100 coupled with a jump in audio hardware coupled with a built in headphone jack on handhelds has done wonders for the overall sound quality portable games can pump out these days. It's quite obvious that certain developers have noticed too as a company like Q Entertainment has really focused on pushing the sound aspect in their games like Lumines and Meteos. 

If you have not tried your current portable gaming device with a descent pair of headphones I can not stress enough how much of the experience you are truely missing. The descent quality audio on the DS and high quality audio of the PSP can truely bring the experience alive in the palm of your hand like you've never experienced before. This is also underscored by the fact that so many well known composers have taken up handheld projects these days too such as Takayuki Nakamura and Nobou Uematsu  as well as up and comers like Takeharu Ishimoto.

Sound quality and soundtracks in general while still talked about in some of the bigger games was for many the last thing they got around to on older platforms like the GBA. Yet now it routinely comes up in previews, reviews, message board posts, and even blogs like this one.  This is rightfully so as the systems have more power and larger storage than ever before so that sound designers aren't an after thought on a project. It's not a intergral part of your overall gaming experience. As Nintendo states on their website in regards to using headphones...

"Use the stereo headphone jack for the ultimate DS sound experience. Suddenly the action isn't just in your hand - it's in your head!"

So get out your headphones the next time you get your handheld gaming device out to get the full on gaming experience not just in the palm of your hands, but in your head as well!