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Comment by aidenn0

18 hours ago

Why did I think the XA decompression happened in the CD-ROM unit rather than the SPU?

It does. The SPU only handles decoding and playback of ADPCM samples from its own memory and receives all CD audio from an I2S bus; the CD-ROM sector decoder chip handles XA-ADPCM decoding and resampling to 44.1 KHz internally, then sends the audio over I2S as if it were CD-DA. This is also why the SPU's ADPCM format is slightly different from XA-ADPCM (no interleaving and 5 filter coefficient presets rather than just the 4 used by XA-ADPCM and the older ADPCM format used on the SNES).