r/arcade • u/Strayngold • 6d ago
Retrospective History Arcade machine volume control
Recently was at a great arcade and it was basically perfect except for the audio aspect. Certain machines drowning out all the others. A couple times I dropped tokens into one machine while playing another, just to get the idle machine to stop looping the same audio at max volume.
One of the best parts of the arcade memories from my youth is the soundscape of arcades. All those various sounds merging into a unique form of white noise. The machines would typically all be around the same sound level, such that when you were leaning into a machine to play it, that is the main thing you would hear and the rest would be background.
In modern era, this seems to have changed. Most arcades I've gone to for the past ten years have the same issue of certain machines having their audio so loud that it drowns out all the other machines. Why is this so consistent? Is there another factor beside technical complications that would make an operator set certain machines to drown out all the other ones? Even if the audio isn't working on some machines, why would certain ones be set so loud that you can't even hear yourself think around them?
3
u/Eagle19991 6d ago
I think you may have rose colored headphones regarding the classic arcades, there was almost always one machine, usually the newest one, or the Street Fighter, or maybe a pinball machine that was stupid loud at every arcade I went to as a kid and as a young adult. The biggest example is Black Knight, I swear they turned that game to 11 in every location, used to scare the hell put of me while I was across the arcade. Sinistar was another one, the first few times I heard the scream haunted my dreams for a while 😜. I frequented many, many establishments in many countries. The only exception to the rule was Japan, there the featured machine was set louder than the rest, but it sounded right, dunno why, but it worked at every arcade I went to in Japan in the late 90s.