Turning off the sound in the game's options menu saves a very significant amount of time. Disabling the music mostly shortens load times, getting rid of the sound effects mainly reduces lag during the stages.

Since a lot of people don't want to play without audio, any runs played with any of these settings changed go into a separate category. This is specific to the SNES version.

Sum of all load times
- ALL ON: 4:22.4
- MUSIC ON, SFX OFF: 4:22.4
- SFX ON, MUSIC OFF: 4:09.6 (-12.8s)
- ALL OFF: 4:08.5 (-13.9s)

Rough estimate of total lag reduction during stages with ALL OFF
- 1:20 to 1:25 (for a 1P1C run)