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Paula - the sound chip used in Amiga computers - offered four channels of digital audio.

Two of these channels were always panned hard-left.

Two of these channels were always panned hard-right.

This is the bread and butter of every Amiga song.

To place a sound in the center - or to place it anywhere in between full-left and full-right - requires using two identical channels, varying only the volume between the two.

Hence, one must always be balancing between complex orchestrations which require careful left/right channel assignment (so as to present a soundscape whose elements are balanced well overall) and more simple arrangements, limited to two pairs of mostly-duplicated channels, where the stereo field can be fine-tuned into a state of balance.

Amiga composers must work around this integral limitation just the same as a NES composer must work around the tuning oddities of the DMC channel, or a Sega Genesis composer must deal with the aliasing of the YM2612, or someone coding 2600 homebrew must come to terms with the effects of alcohol poisoning. A 2A03 where an individual DPCM sample can always be precisely pitched, or a YM2612 with no aliasing, isn't an 2A03 or YM2612, it's an Ableton template.

Anyway, it's odd to hear entries submitted whose renders include four center-panned tracks. It's probably because the foo_input_zxtune plugin puts everything in mono because I guess someone somewhere thought that was the way things should be done.

And hey, the entries sound fine that way - four center-panned tracks is a good way to make a song, just ask George Martin! But it's a bad way to make an Amiga song.

Paula has no center.

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