Again with the "GBA audio is bad" crowd. Fwiw, it was in no way a limitation of the audio hardware itself. It's entirely possible to generate near CD quality audio with the GBA. There are two factors that you run up against when trying to do that in practice. One is cart size; the max is 32MB (which was expensive to make, and generally only reserved for the GBA video collections) so you can't store raw samples willy-nilly. The second is the sound engine typically used ("Sappy"). You could control the quality of the sampled notes, however, raising the quality means increased processing time, meaning less time for the rest of the game code. It was a trade-off developers made that had nothing to do with the sound controller (which could theoretically output at most 32.768KHz, but more commonly did half that or below).
Either blame the CPU for not being beefy enough, or blame the devs for not pushing their code fast and hard enough. But to blame the actual audio hardware in the GBA is just misguided and ridiculous. No two ways about it.
Either blame the CPU for not being beefy enough, or blame the devs for not pushing their code fast and hard enough. But to blame the actual audio hardware in the GBA is just misguided and ridiculous. No two ways about it.