I used this very helpful guide (Gravis Ultrasound Driver Package) to get the GUS working. I tried both the manual installation and copying the files from ULTRASND411 to C:\ULTRASND. The music sounds clear and similar to youtube videos of GUS music, but the sound effects sound very low quality, muffled and staticky. They sound enough worse than the default SB16 sounds that I think something is broken with them.

There seems to be no change if I have "sbtype" set to "sb16" or "none", I read that sometimes having the Sound Blaster enabled too can cause problems.

It seems to be something wrong with either my config setup or DOSBOX-staging itself, because I ran DOSBOX-X using the same virtual C:\ drive and the sound effects were much better. Staging recently had an update that supposedly significantly improved GUS emulation, so they're definitely using different implementations. It's very possible that I just have something wrong in my config, but I've played around with just about everything that I thought would have affected it with no change (cycles, disabling SB, sample rate, etc.).

[gus]
gus = true
gusbase = 240
gusirq = 5
gusdma = 3
ultradir = C:\ULTRASND
gus_filter = off

Entire conf is attached. If anybody knows where I might have gone wrong, I'd appreciate it