I think he's referring to the 14-bit hack that is used to approximate 16-bit sound.
That, and the fact that though the hardware is specified as being capable of only 4 channels, you're clearly getting more than that with Octamed and similar trackers. I call that faking it. And I don't mean that in a bad way.
Yes you COULD buy a 16 bit soundcard, but as usual in amiga land a 16 bit sound card, as I recall was over 200$ and you needed a zorro slot (I had an amiga 500 so that was out)
Conversely, an sb16 (or clone) was like 30-50$.
8 tracks on octamed with paula sounded horrible in comparison to 8 tracks on even the 8 bit soundblaster... And you were still limited to 8 tracks where a cheap pc with 8 bit soundblaster could do 32 track mods or screamtracker modules in stereo.
The 14bit hack sounds okay if your playing a single stereo stream, but it was
not very usuable for mod production.
In any case, I started my digital music creation adventures on an amiga 500. It was very exciting at the time. I used to spend countless hours sampling
sounds, and switching discs between sounds and samples making mods.
It was kind of a let down having to switch, but seeing 8 bit sampled, 32 channels available on a cheapo pc with screamtracker, and especially a bit later seeing 32 and 64 - 16 bit channels available via fasttracker and impulse tracker, I pretty much had to switch.
A comparable amiga setup would have costs me thousands at the time, I would have had to replace my 500 with a 2000 or better, buy a 16 bit soundcard, hard drives and so on...
Well, until the storage capabilities of CD audio caught on in the late 90s, it seems like nearly all PC music was third-rate synthesized MIDI. In my opinion, the Amiga outclassed it in every way with the real-instrument samples embedded in mods, regardless of bitrate.
Yes, it would have been nice if some newer sound hardware had been built in to newer Amigas, but given that your floppy-only A500 was going toe-to-toe with big-box PCs for so long, that's certainly something to be proud of. The shrinking Amiga market post-Commodore made it difficult to stay competitive on price, but I think the competitiveness of technical capability was there with Zorro cards.
