I've been playing Mass Effect 2 for a while now, and since I started playing, I've been having problems with voices sounding very far, faint, or non existant. I have the same issue with Mass Effect 3, to a degree that I've never heard Admiral Hacket at all in the game. If anyone has any solutions, that'd be great.
The problem you described is often linked to the game outputing in surround sound while you only have stereo speakers. In a surround setup, voices come out of the central speaker, which a stereo setup lacks. The stereo speakers only output the echoes of voices, which is especially bad in conversation cutscenes due to fixed positional audio.
The solution to this problem depends on whether you're playing on a console or PC. If you're on PC, right click the speaker icon in the bottom-right corner, click playback devices, highlight the active playback device, and click on configure. Make sure it's set to stereo. I don't know what this looks like on consoles, but there must be audio settings somewhere.
I had a similar problem in ME2 just now. No surround sound at all, and tin-can-voices in the cutscenes. Turns out the driver for my soundcard (Creative X-Fi) has a stereo upmix function (X-Fi CMSS-3D). Turned that off, re-scanned my system in the Mass Effect 2 Config prog, saved the settings and now everything works like a charm.
I know this is a pretty old thread, but i just spend a couple of hours to find a solution for this. Figured this might help somebody in the same situation.
