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...
