The exciting new trend of releasing a working game and gradually destroying it with each successive patch continues unabated I see.

Exciting new sound bug where if you face the source of the sound it sounds like a broken radio but if you turn away from the sound it become clear again - wtf??? I assume something was changed on how sound direction is coded?

At least I managed to get a dragon to actually fight me rather than flying away though.

Please can we at least have some option to roll back to working versions of the game - about 1.2 time, even at 1.1, I had a truly enjoyable game... now every time I see an update my only concern is what previously working feature has been broken for no apparent reason.

Nothing to do with the patch, it just added laa and fixed accented characters.

Have you tried messing with your windows audio settings? Set it to 16bit 44100, and 2.0 speakers. Maybe it's your audio codec, have you got ffdshow installed?

Does it happen in other games?

OK, after 30 mins of broken sounds unless I face away from the source this game is no longer tolerable if you want to converse with NPCs.

This coding is amateur - does no-one actual test this code before it is inflicted upon players? At my company we have a release process that involves some basic QA & acceptance testing on changed code before risking breaking user applications - perhaps someone on the Beth management side might consider putting something in to ensure that code being released into live at least doesn't make problems worse.

Appreciate the advice but the only change to my system is the patch. Audio was fine when I last played.

Usual basics done - close and reload game, close and reload program, reboot etc.

The symptom is totally in game in that if my character directly faces the speaker I get broken nearly inaudible sound BUT if turn 5 degrees or more away from the source the sound is perfect as it was before. I thnk you can appreciate why I see this as a code issue rather than some issue that has affected my system. Also tested in other Beth games (Fallout:NV and Bliv) & non-Beth (Fable 3, DragonAge 2) and no similar behaviour occurs.

I accept it could be a code change that is only having an affect on a specific set of hardware but the logically since nothing else has changed the change has to have been in the code.

If anyone else gets anything like this I'd appreciate confirmation that it is not just me.

What are your speakers set as in windows audio? 2.0 stereo? Quadraphonic? 5.1 surround?

What software is running in the background (by your clock) besides antivirus and steam?

Using any mods or ini tweaks at all?

I'm sure we can fix the problem, together

OK - I'm game

System is Windows 7. CPU - Intel i7 920. 12GB RAM Corsaire.

Speakers are 5.1 & set to 5.1 surround.

No mods or other non-Beth customisation to the game - just whatever Steam have sent down (files verified).

In my systray are... AV, Steam, VM Workstation, Nvidia CP, Outlook, Razer CP (keyboard), sound, Mobo utility, WD External drives & network. Quite willing to close some of this but these have also been running prior to this problem surfacing. Program wise I also have itunes plus firefox open.

First fix to try.

Set windows audio settings to Quadraphonic, or 2.0. If it fixes it, select the next one up, and so on. Maybe theres a bug in there.

After trying that, close your Razor CP, and Mobo Utility, and iTunes.

The problem is the 5.1, works fine with quad & stereo - which allows me to play and I thank you for the suggestion.

In the process I see that alt-tab no longer works, but I can understand why.

I still wonder what has changed in the sound though, it is curious how it is just that 10 degree arc from the source of the voice.

The sound is pretty generic Realtek built in sound on my Gigabyte mobo, although the date of the driver seems a little old so I'll hunt down a more recent one if it exists and try that.

I had the same problem as you. I solved it in the Playback menu (right click your volume bar in the lower left to find it) by fiddling with 5.1 speaker set up.

Oddly, I had to UNCHECK the speakers to get them to play.

Hope that helps.