I had a similar experience calling into Sierra's 800 number and listening to their hold music, which was music from their games played on a Roland MT-32. I had an 8 bit Sound Blaster at the time, which sounded pretty good, but this just absolutely blew my mind.
Today it's kind of impossible to explain to a young person that at one time, there were sound cards, and they were analogous to video cards today in that the music in a game would sound much better depending on how much you spent. In a world with MP3s, MIDI just doesn't compute.
Yeah, it's interesting how we pretty much hit the ceiling on digital audio quality more than a decade ago. If I'd built my computers instead of buying premade, I could still be using the audio card I bought in 2000 and not have any problems with it. That's so alien to the general hardware experience.
Today it's kind of impossible to explain to a young person that at one time, there were sound cards, and they were analogous to video cards today in that the music in a game would sound much better depending on how much you spent. In a world with MP3s, MIDI just doesn't compute.