And I would imagine the the PAULA has to share that as well?
Paula has its own 4 DMA channels that are permanently reserved for itself.
There is no such thing on Amiga as "oh no! The gfx are draining to much electronz! Its suxx0rizing all the quality out of the audio!"
That is the pc/mac way of doing things. Not the Amiga way.
If you heard degraded audio then it was either
A: Your opinion, which you are entitled to. (No one can like all bits of music equally)
B: It was degraded on purpose by the coder of the demo to save memory because that part of the demo was using all the chipram. It was probably doing some hardcore double buffering or triple buffering or preloading an anim that would be shown later or etc. There are a lot of reasons why it would run low on chipram and need to start using samples at a lower resoution.
> But I have tons of ram so that can't be it!
But it wasn't coded for your machine. It was coded exactly and specifically for the machines of the day and had to work on them 100% guaranteed.
I think it was coded to work on 1MB Amigas with only 0.5MB chipram.
C: It might all just be an accident where the coder accidentally turned on the audio filter. The audio filter makes everything sound "dead". This might be exactly what you are hearing.