Rage of the Dragons is kind of interesting... so how different does it have to be though? I remember reading a post where the streams in Fuujin Ryouiki Eretzvaju were actually different from what was on the soundtrack but only slightly, like different mixing or something (but I checked the Eretzvaju thread and can't find that post). But I remember taking the streams from the game after reading that post and they are different, possibly because streams are compressed for game discs but maybe there's also intentionally different mastering for the game. So couldn't that be considered a "lower-quality wave"? But the difference is very small and probably exists in pretty much any game with streamed audio.
Also, there's stuff like SoulCalibur II where they change stuff for the game? I actually dislike the soundtrack compared to the in-game audio. I can hear certain things better in some songs from the game audio, and some instruments are changed completely, for example like in Hubris: the erhu that plays the main melody in the game's audio is a boring violin or something on the soundtrack, there's no tremolo effect or that neat Chinese sound to it. But isn't the soundtrack "first"? There's also Dark Cloud, in which a handful of the songs on the soundtrack are like an entire octave higher on the soundtrack and also it's possible they used a different synthesizer for the songs? (I read that second part in a post.)
I think I'm just trying to understand how different the audio has to be between game and soundtrack and also what kind of changes qualify. "Original source music" seems like a myth. I remember reading that a lot of the original material for the Rockman SNES soundtracks had been lost, so that's not technically the original source music either. In the Rockman X1~6 thread, there's a discussion about the opening song to X2 having sound effects in it that are not present in the SPC set, and the Rockman 1~6 thread mentions some kind of an audible hum so none of that may technically be "source" music.
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