I was fortunate enough to have had a Sound Blaster 16 and a Sound Canvas wavetable board when I was a kid. Cost me a fortune and I only got this expensive combination after being shafted and falling for the marking blurb of the Spea Media FX... So for the later DOS games (Doom and later) I am used to the General MIDI music and that's what feels natural.

Older games I am often torn between Sound Blaster / FM and MT-32. With some games it's an easy choice (Sierra for example), with others not so much (Wing Commander or Prince of Persia).

So I believe that our memories have a lot to do with what we consider to be "best".