I disagree: I'm am very displeased with the state of audio in current games. From the 80's to halfway the 90's we save a trend of music that was synthesized on the computer. This technology was refined more and more and went from the primitive SID6581 on the Commodore 64 to the allmighty Gravis Ultrasound. This was the golden age IMHO.

The last decade we have seen a shift from synthesized music to pre-rendered music. While this allowed composers to escape from the limitations of synthesizer chips and therefore have more freedom, the result was that because there was typically about 30-50mb available on a game CD for audio, the amount of music shipped in games was limited a lot and the quality reduced.

It was also a step into the wrong direction regarding game interaction. Music is very important to shape the atmosphere the player enjoys, and therefore should change according to events in the game.

For example Lucas Arts's Imuse system could go naturally without interruption from one song to another when you moved for example into another room, because the composers had written musical bridges from one song to the other.

Nowadays, with the pre-rendered music it is almost impossible to react to game events. The only thing possible is to interrupt a song and start another.

To make things worse, sound cards have worsened a lot. Most modern "sound cards" are only an D/A-converter, leaving all sound processing to the software. Unfortunately few software synthesizers are of good quality.