The 12 new Game Gear games in Sonic Origins Plus expansion sound weird, according to early reports

rockpapershotgun.com:

The upcoming expansion pack for Sonic Origins (aptly named Sonic Origins Plus) appears to be out in the wild early ahead of its launch on June 23rd, but fans don't seem to be particularly happy with the game's sound quality. The Plus expansion will bring remastered visuals, bonus characters, new modes and challenges to the original Sonic Origins compilation, but it's the audio quality of the 12 new Sonic Game Gear additions that fans seem to have taken issue with. As spotted by TheGamer, fans who have got their hands on copies of the game early, such as YouTuber belmont gr, are reporting that the Game Gear games sound off, like there's some kind of echo effect.

Twitter user errorickplus has since shared a clip online showing a comparison between Sonic 2's Game Gear sound in Sonic Origins Plus and how it sounds on the open source emulator platform RetroArch. This highlights the problem quite effectively, and the Plus version definitely doesn't sound great - like it's got an oddly crunchy feel to it that feels bad in the teeth.

According to another Twitter user, kirisamemofo, this echo effect seems to have been caused by a strange stereo effect that's been applied to these Game Gear games. To show their working, they took the Plus audio and popped it into audio editing program Audacity before making it mono again. In doing so, kirisamemofo has seemingly recreated the cleaner version heard in errorickplus' emulator clip. It's also worth noting that the Game Gear itself only had a mono speaker anyway when it came out in the early 90s, which makes this apparent stereo transformation a bit of an odd choice on Sega's part.

It's a cheap stereo effect (sounds like it's oscillating the panning on both sides?) Making it mono