Is there a consensus on what emulates FDS audio the best?

I'm working on something related to FDS audio, but I don't own the hardware and wanted to prepare some examples. NSFplay is usually my program of choice for listening to NSF files, but I wasn't sure if something else was considered king in this area.

When I use the nsfimport version of Famitracker, it certainly sounds different in there, which is a bummer because I do like the export to wav function in Famitracker.

Or if anyone knows of proper FDS hardware recordings, that'd be very helpful for me to listen and compare.

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Tangentially related, I've started collecting some FDS instruments and posting them here:
http://famicomdisksystem.imgur.com/

I'm seeing some repeated instruments across different games, even by different companies. In some cases it wouldn't be obvious by ear because the instrument might have heavy modulation applied and be used as a sound effect in one game, while being a normal melodic voice in another.

I'm guessing there was some kind of shared toolset for developing for the FDS? This seems like a very specific waveform to appear in both Nintendo (Zelda) and Konami games (Ai Senshi Nicol, Arumana no Kiseki, who knows what else...):
http://i.imgur.com/QBeb4b2.png

There are other examples too and I've only looked at five games so far.

With the last version of NSFPlay I did a lot to try and make FDS sound as accurate as I could to the actual sound of my FDS. I can't say what the "most" accurate FDS emulator is, but I think NSFPlay is very good. If you or anyone can produce a hardware test that shows a difference from NSFPlay, I'd love to hear it.

There's also the Twin Famicom made by sharp that is a combination FDS and Famicom with a single unit. The balance of sound is typically very different with these, I believe. (The FDS is much louder.) Even between individual FDS units there is some variation too, like the process is the same but some units will be louder or more quiet.

Now that we have this,

http://www.tototek.com/store/index.php? ... cts_id=196

All you'd need now is a way to playback NSFs.

Supposedly, this track should have proper bass notes, but in NSFPlay 2.3 it sounds all weird and distorted. So I don't know where the truth lies either.

Since this is clearly a cover of music from a game for Windows 95 and not an original FDS game, I'm not about to assume that this is supposed to run properly on a real FDS. (Especially since the NSF in question has data/code in the FDS' BIOS region.)

Post an FDS disk image and I'd be glad to give it a hardware test for you, but I don't have a way to run NSFs directly on my FDS.

If I were to guess, I'd say that this was made in Famtiracker and will run correctly there (or some chosen anointed emulator) and not on a real FDS, but as always I'd love to be proven wrong with a real hardware test.

It sounds like they're trying to use the modulator to do high frequency FM sound effects, which is outside the scope of things done by original FDS games, and requires very accurate emulation (so every emulator seems to have a different opinion here; very grey area).

That NSF plays correctly when NSFPlay's "$4085 resets modulator phase" hack is enabled.

A lot of defective homebrew FDS tracks seem to rely on this behaviour, which is precisely why I didn't implement it in my own player.

I think Dead_Body and FDSEmu would be a pretty good notion if you wanted to ask him. He's incorporated a lot of different formats already for the disk emulator to accept. NSF shouldn't be that much more difficult with a player.