These are a set of remastered sounds for Aleph One: Pathways Into Darkness, made using iZotope RX5 Advanced.  They are 6 dB quieter than the original (i.e., roughly half as loud), primarily because a few of the original PiD sounds had terrible clipping distortion, and it would not have been possible to compensate for this adequately without reducing reduce their volume; thus, I reduced the volume of the entire set so that the de-clipped sounds wouldn’t be noticeably quieter.  As a result, you’ll want to turn your volume up.

Overall, these should sound hopefully sound like much higher-quality versions of the originals.  The most obvious changes (besides the reduced volume) are that these are much less noisy (since they’re 16-bit) and have frequencies above 5,563.5 Hz (up to 22,050 Hz, in fact), which the originals didn’t.  I also removed some 60 Hz hum on a few of the sounds (probably most obvious on the Headless sounds) and, as mentioned, some clipping.  I tried not to diverge too much from the original sounds and did A/B comparisons to make sure they weren’t diverging too wildly.  Some sounds will sound a lot higher-pitched, but this is mostly because of the absence of upper frequencies on the original; the lower frequency distribution should still be relatively similar for the remastered versions.

It should be noted that, in most cases, these are not exact representations of what these sounds would’ve sounded like if Bungie had used CD-quality audio; they are reconstructions of what they might’ve sounded like, using the best guesses iZotope was able to reconstruct.  In one or two cases, however, I was in fact able to use the original samples as the source of my sounds.  In these cases, I simply applied whatever processing was necessary to make those resemble the original sounds, then mixed them down to mono.  I haven’t found the sources of most of the Pathways sounds, though.

Make sure you have 16-bit sound on; you’ll get the original 8-bit sounds if you don’t.

Further information on my remastering process was included with my Marathon 1 sounds (http://simplici7y.com/items/marathon-1-remastered-sounds-2), my Infinity sounds (http://simplici7y.com/items/remastered-sounds-for-marathon-infinity), and on the Pfhorums (https://pfhorums.com/viewtopic.php?p=188706#p188706).

If you have questions, comments, constructive criticism, offers of employment, etc., the easiest way to contact me is on Discord: join the Marathon server (https://discord.gg/c7rEVgY) and message me by typing @Aaron#6608.  I’m also on the Pfhorums (https://pfhorums.com/) under the username The Man, but I don’t check it very often, and I check my email even less often (a bad habit, but one I don’t expect to get out of anytime soon).

Aaron Freed
December 11, 2020