FYI, all of the music in Star Control 2 is in tracker format (mostly 4-channel MOD, IIRC), so only PCM sound is used. GUS drivers and instrument patches are not a factor.

You can rip the MOD files out of the game's .PKG files with various ripping tools, and listen to those outside of DOSBox in module players to use as a reference. TBH, though, the sound quality can vary widely from one player program to another, due to "interpretation" factors, oversampling, filtering, outright bugs, or whatever; and that situation can also apply to the SB vs. GUS player code in the game.

Ah, thanks for the clarificaton. Tried intro.mod with Fasttracker 2.09 and it indeed sounded perfectly fine over the emulated GUS. There are many settings to tweak in FT2 though, and even though I wasn't able to, there might be one that matches what goes 'wrong' with the game's player?

Why I'm puzzled by this issue, is because Star Control 2 is mentioned in several threads as a shining example of where GUS sounds better than Soundblaster, and though the samples do sound more clear, 'I'm not convinced' due to this. Could it be that later versions of the game (I assume GOG has the most recent) partly broke GUS support, or maybe that DOSBox (or my conf) is adding something to the mix that confuses the game's MOD player?

Having now compared to recordings from actual hardware thanks to this article, it does appear that either my version of SC2 or DOSBox are causing an issue that's not present on an actual, or at least that particular, GUS.