All the ambient music in the game comes through as garbled, chirping noise. I've done some extensive searching, and have seen only a very few posts anywhere about this exact problem, none answered. Apparently some have had this happen way back in Fallout 3, as shown by http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxChbh3ydg8; (not my vid, but it demonstrates the problem exactly) Must not be a common issue, as I haven't found it mentioned in the many problem threads here. Anyone know how to solve this?

The music is located in Steam\steamapps\common\fallout new vegas\Data\Music.

If you play those mp3 files outside the game, in a normal music player, do they play correctly or do they sound like garbled noise there too? If they also sound like garbled noise there, it means the music files somehow gotten corrupt and a reinstall of the game may help.

I've tried that; they play just fine outside the game. Also tried reinstalling.

If you have a Creative soundcard you should be able to use Creative Alchemy Universal (google and download) to fix it. Add NV to the list and use the following values:

Buffers: 10
Duration: 25
Maximum Voice Count: 128

Had that problem with FO3 and this worked then, should work for NV as well.

no, just Realtek onboard sound.