I have this annoying bug the prevents my Skyrim characters from making noise.
When I'm in first person and I sprint, use a dragon shout, or use a power attack my character remains silent throughout it. No FUS-ROH-DAH, ARRRAGH, or heavy panting can be heard.
However, if I go into 3rd person view, and only when I lock the camera to face my character, I can hear them shouting and all of that.

I've tried everything that I can think of to fix this effect, uninstalled all of my mods, deleted Skyrim and re-downloaded it, and performing a factory reset on my computer, and nothing has worked.
I remember when I first played skyrim, and for a couple months afterwards, I could hear all of these sounds.

Anything that could help fix this would be really appreciated.

I'm going to ask the obvious: Have you tried updating your sound drivers?

Just updated them, it didn't work. I still don't hear any sounds related to my character.

I had a very similar problem not that long ago. Maybe even the very same. It turns out that, for some reason, my computer turned on 5.1 Serround Sound without my knowledge. I only have two speakers, and neither of them were associated with the sounds my character would make with the 5.1 serround. It was driving me crazy until I finally started messing with those sound settings and realized what was going on. It was especially unusual because the sound returned to normal if I routed my PC's sound through my TV speakers.

That being said, you should make absolutely sure this hasn't happened to you as well, since i noticed you didn't check this, based on what you've described. Go to Start/Control Panel/Sound, and then right-click on your enabled sound device to bring up the menu that allows you to verify what type of sound system your computer thinks it has set up.

Hope this helps!

sounds like its kinda like my old bug where the voices of every npc was extremely low if i was infront of them but not when i was behind or beside them, gave up trying to fix it and just reinstalled windows and skyrim that seemed to do the trick hehe

Just checked my speakers, and I only have a two speaker option, so I'm assuming it's 2.1 sound. Still hasn't fixed it though.

Actually 2.1 is different than plain stereo. Normal stereo is simply two speakers (Woofer may or may not be included), while 2.1 is two speakers and a woofer in a separate housing.

I see, thanks for the clarification. I only have a $30 pair of computer speakers so no woofers or anything.

One thing to try is deleting the .ini file. The problem there is that, with the cloud turned on, Skyrim will automatically redownload it from what I gather. What you can do though is turn off cloud syncing for Skyrim, delete the .ini, and start up the game as it should recreate one.

Just tried that. If the Skyrim.ini from the My Documents folder was the one to delete, it didn't fix my problem.

Edit - Just deleted the one in my Skyrim folder for steam, still didn't work.

Bump.

Bumping again. Is there anything else I can try? I can't ever hear my arrows firing from the bow.

Fixed it! For some reason the problem had something to do with my external harddrive in which the game was saved. I moved the Skyrim game to my primary harddrive and used a symlink to link it back to my steam folder. All my sounds work correctly now.