There has been a lot of back and forth on the topic of Qsound and the "Qsound" amps/speakers on these cabs.
Let's demystify this qsound thing, as far as I can tell from everything I have read, schematics of the qsound amp, etc... The amp and speakers are nothing special, it's just a regular amp and speakers. Nothing more, the fact that the speakers were made by Yamaha, again is nothing special, its a speaker.
Qsound was a mix of different "technologies" to produce a 3D virtualization of different mono sounds. It basically an algorithm they came up with after a lot of listening tests to find the one that works the best.
In the case of the CPS1.5 games/hardware, they are using the Q1 tech/chip -
Capcom basically licensed their software and used their Q1 tec/chip to act as a DSP on the CPS1.5, etc...
I'm thinking this was more of a security/anti-bootlegging effort and well also a new attractive "feature" for their games to set them apart from their competitors that were only using mono and/or basic stereo at the time.
I have seen also talks about the Yamaha speakers used in some of these cabs being special in some way. Yamaha also licensed their Qsound software, again there is no Qsound tech/hardware being applied to/built into the Yamaha speakers found in these Qsound labeled cabs by Yamaha.
Attached is a pdf of the describing qsound tech for OEMs
The way I see it Capcom is basically using the "3D" audio authoring/mixing tools from Qsound to generate the audio/positional data and the Q1 chip to do the DSP/Filtering, etc.. recreating that Qsound 3D effect over regular speakers using a regular amp.
This is the reason why the FPGA solution if implemented correctly, will work the same as the original QSound Q1 chip.
@Darksoft, working with
@jotego, has already tested and verified that the FPGA solution works exactly like the original.
So as long as you have a stereo amp/speaker setup you should notice the Qsound 3D effect. Will it sound better? That's up to the listener