So, I've set cycles to 10000 to get rid of some sound issues and because people recommend it as the best setting to avoid certain timer bugs.

Now the thing is, the setting is obviously doing something right because setting it any higher and parts of conversations occasionally get cut off, a good example would be Grace's "Sure, goodbye" during her phone conversation with lolita at the beginning of the game.

On the other hand, as implied by the topic title, the game suffers from serious slowdowns and sound lags in parts. A good example would be if you look through the binoculars at the park visitors, it's like a slide show.

I've seen this issue mentioned elsewhere but what I'd really like to know, is this actually how the game ran on a real DOS machine back in the day? If the game always ran slow like this I wouldn't even mind but if it's an issue with DOSBox then we've got a problem.

I think it's just a DOSBox problem. I certainly don't remember it running like that back in the day, though I mostly played it on a Win95 machine at the time and have the CD version, if that means anything.