Loss of Spoken Dialogue

[Arthmoor]

Got a strange one here. One of my roommates has lost the spoken audio for NPC dialogue. The strange part is, it only goes silent when he speaks to the NPC. Background conversation dialogue plays normally.

This isn't mod related either since I had him unload all the mods he's using and started a fresh game on a fresh Oblivion.ini file. We listened to Valen Dreth taunt us from across the hall, then listened to the Blades and the Emperor discuss his dead sons. Then the Blades ordering the player to the window. Everything was working perfectly right up until the Emperor started the conversation with the player. At that point, only the subtitles were displayed.

Even stranger still, in all test cases the lip sync was working perfectly.

We then checked a few other games on the computer and they're all fine, including those with voice acted characters. It even plays the loose MP3 files for the dialogue just fine in media player.

And the last bit of strangeness? He played the game sometime last week and had no issues of any sort. Nothing on this PC has changed since I set up the game for him to use mods.

He's using Windows 7 Pro 64 bit, has 4GB of RAM, a large hard drive, a Radeon 4850 with 2GB and on board Realtek sound. The drivers are all up to date. DirectX has been updated as well, including the proper DX9 setup for the game.

I'm stumped. I've never seen anything have so specific an outcome like this. Usually you'll have all audio go at the same time, or it will be just the voiced audio, but never something where the voiced audio dies ONLY when the player walks up to talk to an NPC.

Any ideas?

[WhoGuru]

Yikes. I've had a similar issue in the past. None of the NPC dialogue would play during conversation and the subtitles would shoot by too fast to read while the lip Synch was just fine. Despite months of looking for help on the OF I never did find a solution that worked and ended up completely removing the game from my HDD and reinstalling from scratch.

[Hanaisse]

The only time I've seen this happen before is if a foreign mod is installed. Check through all his data folders and make sure there's nothing laying around in those with odd foreign characters, and check all the sound\voice folders especially.

[Arthmoor]

Well that's a pain but I guess it's worth a try. Nothing else seems to be forthcoming. Fortunately in this case the dialogue subtitles are still operating at a normal speed.

Oh, and no foreign mods or mods with foreign charsets in their filenames either.

[Game3nder]

Omg I can help!

I had this exact same issue about a week ago, and it came down to my speaker settings. I had just gotten a new 5.1 set, and naturally set the sound card to 5.1. I saw mention on a forum somewhere else (no idea where, I just googled for a while) that the sound card can't be set to anything but 2.1. Only the direct conversations are affected, all the other ambient voice and sound effects play just fine.

Basically, once I set the sound card back to 2.1, the spoken dialogue returns! You said nothing has changed on the PC, but this seems like too specific a problem to have very many possible causes.

[Arthmoor]

Well I guess we can try 2.1 again but he's got 4 speakers hooked up and the game was working fine last week with sound coming out of all 4, including NPC dialogue.

[AndalayBay]

I'm running 5.1 with no problems. Now I'm running Win 7 64 and my speaker configuration is actually listed as "High definition audio device". I also have S/PDIF set up, but that's not being used. Not sure if that helps...

[Game3nder]

I still get sound from all 6 of the speakers on the 2.1 setting. It may have something to do with the sound card as well, though. I was using the "Realtek HD Audio Device" on the motherboard, but just did a little upgrade to a Creative Soundblaster Audigy. I got the speakers after the card, but if Andalay is using the same card that I was, then I guess the 5.1 setting isn't always an issue. It takes 10 seconds though, worth a shot

[Mishaxhi]

I ran into this problem, reinstalled twice

Turned out I'd turned off voices in the audio settings for recording purposes earlier

I felt stupid

[Arthmoor]

Well he finally went and checked it. Changed the stereo settings in Windows to quadraphonic instead of 5.1. Everything is working now. Thanks all, bizarre issues like this are a pain