After an extended period away from Skyrim, I recently reinstalled the game and began experiencing for the first time a very persistent bug related to the ambient dialogue (e.g., greetings and random conversations) of NPCs. Specifically, the dialogue audio drops out for around a second if the player moves after an ambient audio clip has been triggered, and consequently that section of the speech is lost (the audio does not pick up again right at the dropped location, but rather seemingly continues playing inaudibly during this time until it returns). My PC hardware has not changed since the last time I played the game about 18 months ago.

Naturally I did my very best to search for a solution online, and although there are a surprisingly large number of posts on various sites with players bringing up this issue, I have yet to find any sort of fix that genuinely eliminates the problem. The issue is most commonly attributed to Realtek audio chipsets, and/or Skyrim incorrectly processing Surround (5.1 or 7.1) audio streams, however in my experience neither of these things are directly related to the issue. There seems to be something very specific and peculiar with NPC audio that causes the behavior.

Without exhaustively going over every single configuration setting that I've adjusted to attempt to alleviate the problem, I will say that I have tried all of the typical fixes suggested for this issue such as changing audio bitrates, surround sound and channel configurations. Nothing related to audio hardware seems to have any particular affect on the issue.

I'm hoping there is some sort of hidden, closely-guarded secret fix that someone might be able to suggest, as I've been trying for days now to sort out this issue with no luck.

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks!

Hmm, how did you uninstall the game? If you left the directories behind (which need to be manually deleted) then there could be some file or mod sludge getting in the way.

Also, you can try deleting the INI and Prefs files (that were probably not removed during the Uninstall) and let the game create new ones (the ones in My Games/Skyrim, not the install directory)

As for the Realtek, if this is a new rig, then it is worth looking at, if this is the same rig then unless you did a driver or firmware update since the last time you played, the problem is not there. If this is a new rig, then get the latest drivers from Realtek, not the motherboard maker.

But, what could have happened is you installed a media player of some kind that put some dodgy codecs into your machine.

I should have perhaps been more specific: though the hardware is the same, I have changed and reformatted drives since the game was originally used on this machine. There was nothing left from previous installs and I keep this PC very clean for gaming purposes. I don't have any extraneous codecs or software on the PC.

Many people on other forums have reported that older patches (<=1.4) do not exhibit the bug, and I can also confirm that the much older patches do in fact eliminate the issue entirely. I don't have the means to test each patch to identify specifically which release introduced this issue, but it does appear to be directly related to an official patch change that is interacting poorly with certain hardware.

Have you installed the "unofficial skyrim patch" ???

If not, save your game with it, reload, launch again, it should fix the problem.

As for the sound i use the default realtek audio drivers, but i use the newest HD audio drivers from Nvidia.

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The same think goes to the computer from the Internet cafe, that i am using right know.

They using old Realtek drivers, but newly installed Nvidia HD audio drivers, as you can see. !!!!

http://imageshack.us/f/571/kf9v.jpg/

Skyrim audio works well. !!!!

I've been getting this problem lately too, and I haven't even changed anything or uninstalled/reinstalled any programs including Skyrim. It just started happening one day (and yes, I have the unofficial patch before you ask).

I have no idea what causes this problem, but it would be nice to see a solution as it's a bit disconcerting.

OK i found something that may or not solve the problem with the sound...

Go to your Control panel -> Sound -> double click speakers -> Enhancements tab: check Virtual Surround

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/13/4br9.jpg/

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If that not helps you out you can try that from this forum:

I fixed the NPC voices cutting out issue! YUSSSS!

For anyone with a Realtek sound card who is still having this problem, I just thought I'd share what worked for me.

I tried all of the above things and every other suggestion I could find, and none of it worked. I was looking up surround headphones at the time, and one review pointed out that they are just standard headphones with special drivers, and you can easily get software that does the same thing. When I installed one, I noticed it created its own playback device, seperate from the Realtek one. So I thought maybe if you bypass the Realtek driver altogether, it might fix this problem. And it did.

- Go to Sound in Control Panel and disable any device that has Realtek in its name. Also go to Add/Remove Programs and uninstall the Realtek drivers from there. (You can always download them again later if this doesn't work).

- Search for "razer surround", click on the first result, download and install.

You MUST do it in the above order or it won't work. Razer Surround is the first one I found; I'm not necessarily recommending it over others. It's free until the end of 2013 but remember to go back and DONATE if it works! If you have any problems, make Razer Surround Audio Controller is selected as the default playback device, and that there are no Realtek devices in the list.

Hope this helps someone out there.