If we're talking 16-bit era, Sonic by a considerable margin. The melodies, harmonies, arrangements, consistency and genre variety were absolutely light years ahead of what Nintendo were doing with Mario games at the time. And I disagree that Mario's highs were higher than Sonic's. The underground theme in Yoshi's Island is undoubtedly top quality and the highlight of the 2D Mario soundtracks, but it can't hold a candle to Chemical Plant, Hydrocity Act 2, Star Light or the Sonic 3 staff roll. The fact that Sonic manages to sound so much better even on a console with inferior sound quality just highlights the gulf in class in composition.
If we're talking 3D games, it becomes closer. On the one hand, I think Crush 40 are absolutely terrible and the "butt rock" direction was a really bad one to go in. The Sonic Heroes theme is just vomit worthy Saturday morning crap. On the other hand, I like most of Sonic Adventure's soundtrack despite their influence, dreadful game though it undoubtedly is. The underground section of Casinopolis, Final Egg and in particular Tikal's Theme are highlights. As for Mario, it was just more of the humdrum same really, Galaxy excepted, which was quality. Even Super Mario 64, which is probably the best non-Galaxy 3D Mario soundtrack, is basically 2 or 3 good tracks and a load of mediocre annoying ones which just repeat throughout the whole game. Mario wins this round marginally for me, but Sonic is still ahead overall.
I'd say so, Mario, Donkey Kong, Yoshi, Zelda, Metroid, Pokemon, Kid Icarus Uprising, Kirby, F-Zero, Golden Sun, Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, Xenoblade, Mother, plus more easily surpasses the soundtrack of SEGA games.
It's clear that's my own opinion. Btw, how much experience do you have with everything I mentioned that isn't DK and Metroid?
You probably shouldn't be asking that question when it's pretty clear you know next to nothing about Sega soundtracks yourself.
Shenmue and the Panzer Dragoon series (particularly Saga) have osts that completely annihilate anything mentioned in your first post (and yes I have played them all). It's seriously not even close. And that's not even mentioning the Sonics, Streets of Rage, Jet Set Radio, Virtua Fighter 2, Nights, Rez and countless others.
Nintendo have always made the best games but there are many Japanese developers, including Sega, who have consistently outperformed them in the auditory stakes.
What is lately with SEGA fans desperately trying claim Sonic does something better than Mario..
This is just lolz quite frankly.
In the early to mid 90s the Nintendo fans were at least reasonable enough to argue that "apart from music and visuals, Mario is better than Sonic in every way" (which is 100% true), yet even that's not good enough for your average 2016 GAF reading Nintendo fanboy who insists that Nintetndo have to be the absolute best at absolutely everything at absolutely every moment of gaming history. It's pretty embarrassing some of the revisionist ignorance you read from them in old console wars threads and makes it abundantly clear that most of them have very little experience of games from that era that weren't developed by their favourite company.
