(mainly because the naive mixers they use are garbage, not because stereo is bad. I've noticed that with nearly every retro engine, be it Doom ports, Build ports or the real ancient deal - the ones sticking to the original sound mixers just sound so much inferior compared to modern sound engines. The advantage would be that OpenAL provides a true professional 3D sound mixer which, even when restricted to a 2D plane and ignoring the height component (unfortunately unavoidable unless the entire sound design was refactored as well) sounds so much better than these old and primitive stereo mixers, especially if you have a good 5.1 system connected. If I am really in the need to ditch it I'd probably use GZDoom's sound system instead with a few adjustments regarding the sound limits - which are a bit low thanks to an old ZDoom decision. If you want more channels the least you have to do is prioritize away some sound that play too often. The sound system is essentially original Doom with a 4x channel increase, and that simply cannot work.
The sound problems are not caused by SDL - the mixer is 100% appplication code, it only uses SDL for outputting it.
