I recently upgraded most of my hardware and found that when trying to play Skyrim on my upgraded machine the only sounds playing were actor voices and the music on the bethesda logo at the start of the game.
After some snooping I found that I'm not the only one with this problem and that it is mostly related to the Realtek HD Audio card on the mobo.
However, I tried plugging my speakers into the Creative SB X-Fi card I have and nothing changed. I've tried fiddling with audio quality, surround setup, loudness equalization and pretty much every solution I've found so far but nothing has helped.
I've also contacted both Bethesda and Steam for help and tried everything they told me to do, including disabling one of my two monitors O_o


All of my drivers should be up to date and I have no issues with any other games, so this is getting a bit annoying. If I hadn't already done most of what I wanted to do in Skyrim I would most likely be demanding my money back because while I have enjoyed playing it there are more bugs and issues than most beta games I have tried.


That being said; there are still things I would like to do in Skyrim, but playing with no weapon sounds or anything isn't good enough, so I'm hoping some of you are able to help me figure this out. I would greatly appreciate any help.

Hardware specs:

ASUS Sabertooth P67
Intel i7-2600K 3,4GHz
8GB RAM
Zotac GeForce GTX 570
Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi XtremeGamer

And if it helps; I have two speakers connected via a Philips mini system, no fancy surround speaker setup.

I had this exact problem and it turned out that I had my sound card set to 4/5 channel mode even though I was using stereo speakers.
As a result, anything in the middle i.e. pick mining sounds or weapons etc that would be in the centre channel disappeared.

This might not be your problem but it was for me and it sounds similar. Try going to a waterfall and moving it from left visual to right visual, if the water sounds disappear in the middle or go super quiet, chances are that's the problem.

Can't be it, right now my sound card is set to Stereo mode and shows that all sounds go through two speakers. I have also tried 5.1 mode and putting all sound through two speakers, didn't help either.