Sound for voices VERY low / faint

[Sgt Engee]

Since I've started playing Skyrim about a week or so ago, I've been having problems with the voices of NPC's in the game. Specifically hearing them. Unless I'm right in there faces and looking directly at them their voices are EXTREMELY faint and quiet. I have the in game audio control for the game cranked up to max.

I have RelTek / Asus audio drivers version 6.0.1.6662. I'm not running any mods. I have Dawnguard, Hearthfire and the High Resolution Texture pack installed. Any help is appreciated.

[Sk'ar]

Right click on the speaker icon in the system tray and select "Playback devices". Click on the "Communications" tab and make sure that "Do nothing" is selected.

[Sgt Engee]

Done already. I had to perform that fix for 40k Retribution. Everytime I started last stand it would mute all my other sound (including ventrilo). So this is sadly not causing the issue. I just reinstalled my audio drviers directly from Realtek's website so I know that isn't the issue. Still stumped.

[Randox]

Never thought about communications being the option. I'll give that a spin myself. I just fine the voices to be very...picky. Specific camera angles make it so that its like people are right next to me, and others are like I'm being talked to from the other side of the room. I've also been tempted to kill a few gurds when they talk over whoever I am trying to listen too. For some reason guards always seem to be the loudest :D

[TRANQUILD3V1L]

if your still having sound issues in game try this
Go to Start -> Control Panel -> Sound
In the Playback tab, right click on Speakers (or whatever has a green tick next to it), then click Properties
In the advanced tab on this new window, select 24 bit, 44100Hz (Studio Quality) in the drop down menu
i had to play around with my sound and set it to 5.1 if you dont have 5.1 do the speaker fill option in your realtek sound manager..worked for me and i have normal full sound now

[Sk'ar]

I got Parrot Zik Bluetooth headphones for XMAS, but find that they have very low audio on Skyrim. They work fine with music players and other games such as Morrowind and Oblivion. Searching the Skyrim forum, I find that there is a 24 bit requirement for audio. I went to the sound playback advanced properties, but 16 bit 44100Hz is the only selection. This sound limitation is not only unnecessary, but seriously cripples what is otherwise an excellent game. Why has Bethesda done this to begin with and why haven't they fixed this restriction?

[Sgt Engee]

I went ahead and submitted the probelm to Bethesda. I'll post back here if they reply or I find another solution.

[Fishercat]

Did anyone ever get a solution to this problem. I bought Skyrim for pc last week and the only sound I seem to have a problem with is people talking. Pretty much everything else seems ok.

[Mishobu]

Found this on another fórum and worked like a charm, i hope it works for you too:

"Well I'll make this a thread so I think more people will look at it
When I installed skyrim on my r1 everything was fine, I just noticed that the game volume was too low
I left the game with the main screen to hear the song and I culdnt hear it without headphones or from 3 meters from the m11x so I found this fix on the internet and some of mine

on the control panel > hardware and sound > sound menu
select your speakers (realtek high definition audio for me) then > properties > then go to enhancements tab > and check the loudness equalization, then re-launch skyrim, and check for differences on audio, this helped me but

then I went to the SRS tab on the sound menu checked to enable SRS technology (this is from realtek HD audio controller) and selected the game option

then the game really sounded really good and noticed I can hear everythig just fine and not with max volume
I hope this helps also I have on the advanced tab the sound set to Studio quality 24 bit, 44000 Hz

greetings from skyrim brothers! "

[Siups]

I had the same problem but solved it myself.
Changed the sound quality to 44khz 24bit like above and at the same time i unchecked in my realtek settings "Change/Swap center speaker with subwoofer". Previously it was set wrong in my driver settings. Try it yourself maybe it will also work for you.

[Zaotron]

Mishobu's suggestion for enabling "Loudness equalization" helped.

[minion7911]

Originally posted by Mishobu:

Found this on another fórum and worked like a charm, i hope it works for you too:

"Well I'll make this a thread so I think more people will look at it
When I installed skyrim on my r1 everything was fine, I just noticed that the game volume was too low
I left the game with the main screen to hear the song and I culdnt hear it without headphones or from 3 meters from the m11x so I found this fix on the internet and some of mine

on the control panel > hardware and sound > sound menu
select your speakers (realtek high definition audio for me) then > properties > then go to enhancements tab > and check the loudness equalization, then re-launch skyrim, and check for differences on audio, this helped me but

then I went to the SRS tab on the sound menu checked to enable SRS technology (this is from realtek HD audio controller) and selected the game option

then the game really sounded really good and noticed I can hear everythig just fine and not with max volume
I hope this helps also I have on the advanced tab the sound set to Studio quality 24 bit, 44000 Hz

greetings from skyrim brothers! "

Originally posted by Zaozilla:

Mishobu's suggestion for enabling "Loudness equalization" helped.

worked very well for me

[Valtiel]

I just had a similar problem. The solutions here weren't quite what I needed but got me looking in the right place. Hopefully this helps others who find this thread.

I have a Creative sound card driving a 2.1 system. I noticed that other sounds weren't so dim, including the music, but dialogue was both faint and had an environmental echo. The one time it was loud enough was when I turned away from an NPC after a conversation. Their 'farewell' was loud.

Turns out, as it has in the past, that my software for the sound card defaulted itself to a 5.1 signal after updating. It was trying to send the dialogue to a centre speaker I didn't have; the left and right stereos I did have were only receiving supporting environmental reverb. Check your settings (windows and third party) to see if it is sending to a set of speakers you don't have.

Hope that helps!

[Louiserr]

Originally posted by Valtiel:

I just had a similar problem. The solutions here weren't quite what I needed but got me looking in the right place. Hopefully this helps others who find this thread.

I have a Creative sound card driving a 2.1 system. I noticed that other sounds weren't so dim, including the music, but dialogue was both faint and had an environmental echo. The one time it was loud enough was when I turned away from an NPC after a conversation. Their 'farewell' was loud.

Turns out, as it has in the past, that my software for the sound card defaulted itself to a 5.1 signal after updating. It was trying to send the dialogue to a centre speaker I didn't have; the left and right stereos I did have were only receiving supporting environmental reverb. Check your settings (windows and third party) to see if it is sending to a set of speakers you don't have.

Hope that helps!

This is the exact problem I'm having - it was fine until a few weeks ago! I can hear voices fine if the characters are to the left or right of the screen, or even behind me, but I can't hear them when facing them directly.

How did you change/check the settings? Help would be appreciated! :)

[Lor]

Originally posted by kenneth.underwood:

Right click on the speaker icon in the system tray and select "Playback devices". Click on the "Communications" tab and make sure that "Do nothing" is selected.

Sorry for the necro but since I just had this issue I'd like to add this worked for me. The problem was that I'd set the sound settings to 'surround' when listening to some music, but plugging in headphones meant any sound my character was directly facing was muted. Defaulting back to normal sound settings for my 'speaker' (headphones) resolved the issue for me.

[Swifty Magee]

Sorry to add another necro post about this issue, but I've finally found solutions to the weird audio issues that have bugged me in the Skyrim games (both Oldrim and SE) for years upon years!

The general audio volume has always been low on both games over various PCs and setups for me. It seems like I've finally solved the problem, however. What I seemingly did to fix my long-standing audio issue was...

1. Have a fresh install of Skyrim SE
2. Download and install SSEEdit
3. Launch SSEEdit and hit the "OK" button
4. Highlight the "Update.esm", "Dawnguard.esm", "Hearthfires.esm", and "Dragonborn.esm" files; right-click the files and select the Clean Masters option
5. Wait for SSEEdit to clean (only took a few seconds for me) and close SSEEdit

After doing that, the low audio problem that I've been having for practically forever was finally fixed! And over the years I've tried every other troubleshooting fix I could find (the "Playback devices->Do Nothing" fix, the "Loudness Equalization" trick, the RealTek SRS Game setting tip, changing speaker settings, installing HD audio mods, etc.). Cleaning the masters in SSEEdit seems like the only thing I did recently to Skyrim that would have solved this problem!

Unfortunately after doing that, I now had some sort of weird 3d audio issue where every NPC voice in front of my character's face was loud but anyone talking directly behind my character sounded like they were a mile away. Someone could literally be right behind me and say a voice clip, and it was barely audible...I wouldn't know anyone had said anything if it wasn't for subtitles! I tried downloading the mod "Binaural 3D Surround Sound for Headphones" to see if that would help, but that just reduced the game's audio again.

Luckily I figured out how to fix this new problem, too: right-click your system's speaker icon and go into your speaker's properties, go to the Advanced tab, and change the sample rate to either 24 bit 96000 Hz or 24 bit 196000 Hz. By default it was 24 bit 48000 Hz, but after changing it to one of those two, I had full NPC voice audio all around my character.

So hopefully if someone has been having issues with Skyrim's janky audio for the last 8 years and never found any solutions, they'll stumble across this post and work something out. Even if this doesn't help anyone else, at least I'll be able to come back to my post if I forget how to solve this issue in the future.

Oh, and one more tip I found out. Normally Skyrim doesn't allow you to adjust your PC's volume in-game if you use something like volume keys or a volume bar on your keyboard to do so. If you want to adjust volume without alt+tabbing out of the game, just Shift+Tab to open Steam's Overlay. Once you're on the Overlay screen you should be able to adjust your system's volume via keyboard.

I love Bethesda games (excluding Fallout 76), but some of the hassles you have to go through just to get things to work right is a major pain.