Two of the more famous and highly regarded sound chips in the 8-bit era were the Commodore 64's SID and the Nintendo APU. Which of the two was overall better, seems to be a matter on which there is a perennial difference of opinion, but this caught my eye on https://www.reddit.com/r/fpgagaming/comments/gxol18/mister_nes_core_apu_rewrite_by_kitrinx/
While the C64's SID chip was arguably better - the NES had 5 voices to Commodore's 3 but the SID was programmable while the NES APU was not - though the NES had limited ability to play sampled audio - the NES was less expensive and purpose built for games and it showed.
Now I'm curious: what could be meant about the NES being purpose built for games, in the context of sound hardware? The SID was good at music, but games in general have music, so... on the face of it, the two machines would seem to have the same requirements for sound generation capability.
What could the SID do that the APU couldn't? Was there some non-game kind of sound the former was particularly good at?