Howdy guys,

Basically if I'm not looking directly at the person takling, I can't hear them. It's a little better if I'm in 3rd person, but sometimes an NPC will initiate dialogue from behind me, and I can't hear anything.

Any possible solution in the settings for this?

There was a sticky post at some point relating to some crashes, but from that post I got something that fixed my sound issues, which my have been the same as yours.

find the sound options in windows and set the properties to

24bit, 44100 Hz.

I can't give you the specific location because I'm not using English windows. But I just rightclick the sound icon in my taskbar and it is one of the options that will lead you there.

Had similar issues myself. The sound setting has been fixed and the game should no longer crash or experience choppy dialogue at settings other than 44000hz. Any crashes with the current patch is related to modded games not using the 4gb launcher. My current setup is a home theater system using the optical connector into a 5.1 surround sound system. If you are running in surround sound and if possible, you will have to turn your center channel up quite a bit to get voices loud enough to hear over the rest of the game. This resolved the matter for me. Some people are going to have to go into their sound settings in the OS and turn their speakers to 2.1 if they do not have the option of turn individual speakers up in their OS settings. The 2.1 seems to resolve most issues with this, but it really depends on what sound card you are using, how you are using it, and what speakers/receiver rig you are using.

I'll check to see if that'll work. Thanks.

Your speaker setup is set to something Skyrim cannot use. Set it to 2.0 stereo in the Windows audio settings. This will fix it.