Game runs fine, but the sound is very bad, especially the voices. A terrible "sparkly" or "electric" sound lies on top of the voices, and it doesn't sound good. It's not the speakers, I have tried several.
Does anyone else have the same problem?

Did you ever get the dialog popping/jumbling problem? This doesn't seem to affect that at all.
I should make a wav or something to demonstrate.
You know, some of the pops and crackles are probably in the original sound file. LOOK at Grace's coat in the starting room. I hear a huge pop sound within the first second of the clip, every time. Same goes for LOOKing at the coffee pot.
edit: I've uploaded a wav with those two examples here. (right-click, Save As)
This doesn't demonstrate the dialog jumbling problem, but that isn't easily reproducible.

Thanks Mate, seems to have improved it for me but the problem still occurs now and then.

Yes, this also solved the problem. The voices still have the problems I described in my last post, but I guess that's just how the original sound files are, as epmode said above.
Thank you.

This video has the clicks and pops as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WULkhdQmJQw. I just found out that the voice actor for the secretary is Leah Remini who plays Carrie on King of Queens.

hi guys, sorry my sb16 fix didn't seem to work for everybody. :(
since it appeared that my symptoms were the same as everyone else, i thought the cure would be similarly universal.
i did change some of the other settings, and i fooled around with every mixer/soundblaster setting.
this is what i found you can try.
first, make sure you understand where every sound is coming from.
the music in-game, as well as the sierra logo are all midi.
the introduction song seems to be the only digital music file i can find, and maybe the ending song, but i haven't got there yet...
the speech is also digital, but is possibly using the adlib opl~ support.
this means you may have some luck manually adjusting for the opl level (which is the specific yamaha chip that dosbox will emulate)
then you can adjust the opl sampling rate independently of the mixer sampling rate, and see if that helps.
i have it set to opl3, which is the most recent of those chips, and the one shared by last generation adlibs and the soundblaster 16.
you may have luck trying opl or opl2?
so, also check out your midi settings, and you can look at the emulation type.
these setting will affect your music, not your speech.
uart/intelligent shouldn't make a difference one way or the other. intelligent offers extra support for features of later mt-32 models (all in hardware), so it probably won't be necessary, but it also won't likely hurt anything either, which is why they leave it on i suspect.
the device should probably be default, which will undoubtedly be win32 for most of you, the other options are for linux, ubutnu, and os x. so, you can try manually putting win32 in, it shouldn't hurt anything.
the last option is for your emulator, this can make a huge difference in sound.
basically, the way midi works is that it sends coded instructions out to a midi device. each device will interpret the codes differently, and give you a different sound. some will be simple, and some complex sounding.
if you want to adjust this, first open dosbox and type mixer/listmidi. this will give you a list of numbered devices present on your system that dosbox can see, and therefore use.
then, put the number of the device you want to use in the config space in the midi section of the dosbox config file.
i am using the microsoft one, but i also have options for my soundblaster live card, and an external midi port.
remember that any device that has the word "external" on it will require an additional piece of hardware in the form of a mt-32 or similar device.
One last note on this midi business... for some reason, dosbox is changing the volume of my midi device on me, and i don't know why.
if you lose sound, open your system volume and make sure the midi volume level is up.
you may have to add the midi volume slider to the master control window, because it isn't always there by default.
lastly
i will say that i still have a bit of a pop now and then on the speech, when it comes and goes, but i believe that is a software mixing issue, and that all you can do is probably to smooth out the edges of the speech samples by lowering the sampling rate.
keep in mind that the original equipment we played this on didn't have the instructions pass through dosbox for various levels of emulation, and we are also playing the sound on much more accurate equipment these days, which will reveal more flaws.
all in all, i think my sound is pretty damn good for 1993 video game speech at this point. :)

That's a good post and I'm going to play around with those OPL tweaks later. I don't notice any problems with the music so I'm good for the MIDI settings.
Would you mind taking a listen to that WAV file I linked in an earlier post? I'd appreciate it if you could tell me if the same thing happens on your setup. It's very easy to try those bits of dialog yourself, just start a new game and LOOK at the coffee pot or the coat in the corner.

@epmode
i'm not sure if you are still having a "jumbling problem," but i haven't got that at all, so it's hard for me to troubleshoot. :(
are you running the dos version, or the windows version?
as for the opl settings, i have a few updated comments... before i wrote that you could try opl or opl2.
that was wrong, dosbox doesn't seem to support the first opl chip for some reason (it doesn't list it as an option anyway).
you can choose are olp2, or dualopl2 (which was two opl2 chips used in tandem for stereo before the opl3 chip came out and had on-chip stereo channels).
you can also choose opl3 (soundblaster 16) or cms (creative music systems), which is that old competitor to the soundblaster which was cheaper but didn't sound as good. (i would personally stay away from that one)
also, from my own playing around with the opl settings, i can't get rid of the popping or electric static completely.
it is possible to make the popping softer, but that results in the static fuzz becoming more pronounced and vice-versa.
i ended up just leaving everything at the 22050hz sampling rate, and opl3.
i even tried 47k and opl2, which is what yamaha's spec sheets say the opl2's exact sampling rate is.
it just made the popping really sharp, which was uber annoying.
so i think the deal is that either the pops 1. are in the recording, or they 2. are a result of the emulated opl being dropped in and out of the mix.
if it's the former, there is absolutely nothing that can be done without editing the files.
if it's the later, i haven't found a way to specifically address that issue, and every combination of settings i can think of has not eliminated the pops.
maybe there is a sound doctor with a heart of gold on GOG who can extract and edit the speech files to sound really good or somebody with a lot of dosbox experience who can offer a creative solution to the speech weirdness?
one last though... the speech pops seem to me to sound like a volume problem. the sound i am getting is quite similar to a microphone clip, and seems like it could be that dosbox software mixing is having trouble reconciling it's devices various volumes. i don't know exactly how much dosbox relies on your soundcard or onboard to take care of mixing duties, so if i was to pursue a solution, exploring that angle would be my next step.

@epmode
i'm not sure if you are still having a "jumbling problem," but i haven't got that at all, so it's hard for me to troubleshoot. :(
are you running the dos version, or the windows version?
as for the opl settings, i have a few updated comments... before i wrote that you could try opl or opl2.
that was wrong, dosbox doesn't seem to support the first opl chip for some reason (it doesn't list it as an option anyway).
you can choose are olp2, or dualopl2 (which was two opl2 chips used in tandem for stereo before the opl3 chip came out and had on-chip stereo channels).
you can also choose opl3 (soundblaster 16) or cms (creative music systems), which is that old competitor to the soundblaster which was cheaper but didn't sound as good. (i would personally stay away from that one)
also, from my own playing around with the opl settings, i can't get rid of the popping or electric static completely.
it is possible to make the popping softer, but that results in the static fuzz becoming more pronounced and vice-versa.
i ended up just leaving everything at the 22050hz sampling rate, and opl3.
i even tried 47k and opl2, which is what yamaha's spec sheets say the opl2's exact sampling rate is.
it just made the popping really sharp, which was uber annoying.
so i think the deal is that either the pops 1. are in the recording, or they 2. are a result of the emulated opl being dropped in and out of the mix.
if it's the former, there is absolutely nothing that can be done without editing the files.
if it's the later, i haven't found a way to specifically address that issue, and every combination of settings i can think of has not eliminated the pops.
maybe there is a sound doctor with a heart of gold on GOG who can extract and edit the speech files to sound really good or somebody with a lot of dosbox experience who can offer a creative solution to the speech weirdness?
one last though... the speech pops seem to me to sound like a volume problem. the sound i am getting is quite similar to a microphone clip, and seems like it could be that dosbox software mixing is having trouble reconciling it's devices various volumes. i don't know exactly how much dosbox relies on your soundcard or onboard to take care of mixing duties, so if i was to pursue a solution, exploring that angle would be my next step.

For those willing to extract/burn and install via the XP installer so it plays in XP rather than DOS, remember to turn the acceleration down to none to avoid the sentences being skipped in conversations. Given there must be 40 hours of conversation in this game, I would say the skipping sentences is way more important than the popping! (Which I have never got rid of in the Windows version!)
The other reason to go the extract/burn CD route is the XP installer gives you FMV windows twice the size of those tiny ones in DOS, and the same goes for the credits graphics! :)

Well on the plus side, this problem has largely disappeared after making a few tweaks. Still happens every once in a while but not every third sentence like it was originally.
The idea about the pops being sound clipping on the emulation side rather than something in the audio files themselves is interesting. I'll play around a little more later.
I really wish I had played this game back when it came out so I would know for sure whether or not the audio distortion was there in the first place. (and honestly, I'm not sure how I missed a first-class adventure game like this. I love the genre, after all)Doesn't work in Win 7 64. Should have been obvious from the name, but oh well.

@uk_john
"never got rid of in the windows version"
by this, you are saying that the xp windows version still has pops in the sound, but that you think the larger videos are worth the trouble?
if you haven't solved the pops in the xp version, are you implying that you have solved the problem in the dos version?

oh, i got carried away and forgot about that.
yes, also the same with the coffee machine.
seems identical to my in-game experience.
however, i am not sure what you trying to figure out with that.
is it to see if we are hearing the same thing, or to test the windows sound files against the dos ones?
btw, still no progress on the pops, it just won't go away.

Yeah, I just wanted to make sure that you were hearing the pops in the same exact place as I was.
To be frank, I can live with it this way. As long as I'm not losing a half-sentence here and there I'm just fine. I grew up on horrible digital audio after all!

yeah, me too.
i am getting to the point where looking for a fix is becoming more trouble than just living with the pops.
let's just hope that the beast within works better.
ps i wonder if anybody out there has a gravis ultrasound card?
may sound better since there is supposed to be support for it in this title says wikipedia, and the official sierra system req. page.

No, what I said was running the game by installing the game with the XP Installer (on my XP machine), it got rid of the conversation skipping I was getting with the DOS version, the DOS version does seem to have more popping than the Windows version, but you still get the popping in the windows version, what you don't get in the XP Installer version is the conversation skipping or the tiny FMV windows you get in DOS.