I love seeing the progress people are making in preserving our modern cultural heritage in Dolphin, BSNES, etc. More posts like this, please :-) and great work.
The broken loop sample sounds almost like it could be something from Autechre.
An observation ... Soundcloud's "samples-over-time thumbnail" actually serves a useful purpose in these side-by-side comparisons: You can see before listening that there is a difference or something "missing" in one versus the other.
This was a fun read, I had no idea that the "Zelda" games used a different audio code than all the other offerings.
I'm wondering why Nintendo haven't killed this project already. They usually don't tolerate any fan-use of their IP or anything enabling piracy... I wonder if they're actually using this project internally for something.
I don't think you can kill it in the same way you can't force Intel to stop selling CPUs because they enable piracy. There is loads of emulators out there that would get shutdown if it were true.