From a hardware overview perspective, the Amiga's sound chip was essentially 4 "dumb" 8 bit PCM channels, so audio effects and synth stuff was fundamentally CPU

From a hardware overview perspective, the Amiga's sound chip was essentially 4 "dumb" 8 bit PCM channels, so audio effects and synth stuff was fundamentally CPU driven, and I'm guessing most of the CPU horsepower was going into the 3d rendering, without much left over for sound. The SNES has a completely separate audio subsystem, with 8 16bit PCM channels, with its own CPU and RAM purely dedicated to sound generation.