oh, and I've tried tweaking the the frameskip and the cycles to no avail 😒

you could try selecting another emulated soundcard in dosbox.

How do I do that sorry?

I assume it's under the dosbox.conf file, but what settings should I change to what?

I think Qbix is asking you to select a different card inside your game. Instead of using ... SoundBlaster ... try MIDI, MPU-401, or AdLib. If that doesn't work - and you feel adventurous - disable AdLib in dosbox.conf and enable CMS instead.
--
MiniMax

thanks, but I tried different settings within my game, all gave me the same "burbling" sound (although some sounds seem unnaffected, most do, and the music certainly is)
I briefly tried disabling adlib and enabling cms but I just got no sound at all, however I'm not sure I totally exhausted combinations of ingame settings and dosbox.conf settings, I'll try that tomorrow =\

I finally got "better" sound, but it's really not that much better at all, sounds for the most part are clearer (especially the music), but it still sounds very wrong, and there are obnoxious beeps, where originally there were higher pitched sounds.

When I had garbled sounds, the few sounds that seemed to work were the "smoke puff" type sounds; now they sound really low, and the music sounds almost out of time and jilted sometimes.

To get the sound better I had to use "roland" sound in the game setup. Will this always sound terrible or are there some settings for dosbox or my PC in general that I can do to make them sound decent again. Still, it's better than it has been, recently.

thanks for the help so far!

Just out of interest, are you using Win98 and the debug-enabled version?
I noticed that the log-messages had a tendancy to interrupt audio adding
a background hiss..

I'm on win2000 😒