Amiga audio early lead lost..

[psxphill]

It wasn't until winXP with improved SB cards many years later that wintel surpassed the Ami solution and the AD's still hold their own against the low-mid pc stuff.

It happened during the Windows 95 era. Cool edit was much better for audio editing than anything on the Amiga.

[psxphill]

Most computers use cheap onboard audio chip.

That is because that is all they need, it's good enough for what most people need. Paula can't compete with a cheap onboard audio chip anyway.
 
For producing music then software mixing is fine, you only need to do it in real time for preview. You downmix at the end anyway.
 
Using the 14bit paula hack with multiple channels is much worse than using software mixing on your PC.

[psxphill]

On another, somewhat related note I think the Amiga could seriously have used an additional sound chip.

By 1989 commodore seriously needed better graphics and sound.
To drag out pretty much the 1985 specification into 1991 was optimistic at best.
The management didn't appreciate talent and nobody in engineering had enough influence.
 
I didn't suffer too badly with windows 95, I had a gateway machine around that time. The hardware and drivers were pretty solid.
I switched to a dell a couple of years later and the hardware was so new that the windows 95 driver support wasn't great & the windows 98 beta seemed to have problems with 192mb of ram. So I switched to Windows NT4 & that was very stable.

[psxphill]

Sound in CD players started at 44KHz for a good reason, playing samples at a lower frequency adds noise.

Well sort of, it's mostly due to taking the highest frequency that people can hear then doubling it because of nyquist. The specific frequency was chosen because they wanted to used analogue video tapes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCM_adaptor) to store the digital data on & that was the rate they ended up with (much the same as how they came up with the Amiga's maximum dma sample rate). It also allowed the 74 minutes they wanted in the size cd they wanted.
 
CD players have used filters, oversampling and 1 bit dacs to reduce the harmonics inherent in digital playback.
 
CD audio was over-hyped, it survived so long because people don't like format changes.

[psxphill]

But what is that coloring? Apart from some noisiness I don't hear any.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital-to-analog_converter
 
"The fact that DACs output a sequence of piecewise constant values (known as zero-order hold in sample data textbooks) or rectangular pulses causes multiple harmonics above the Nyquist frequency. Usually, these are removed with a low pass filter acting as a reconstruction filter in applications that require it."
 
The Amiga's low pass filter is far too low to leave enabled when you're outputting 44k. Even with normal rates it sounds too muddy. In fact back in the day I used one of these http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=1447 which really boosted the high frequencies. I might open it to see what it contains, I think it might just be a single channel graphic equaliser.
 
A lot of people don't notice the crunchiness, whether this is due to lack of sensitivity to high frequencies (I can hear frequencies higher than is predicted for my age) or lack of interest I don't know.
 
I still have my ghettoblaster too (picture isn't mine... but it looks the same) and the fake surround and 3d bass really made the amiga sound great.