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?

Hmm. I try to save it and it always tells me "Access Denied"

Probably UAC rearing its head, again. You must have Vista or Win7 and don't have write permissions to the "Program Files" folder. Go to "Start" and type Notepad in the Search box. At the top of the search Menu, right click on Notepad.exe and choose "Run as administrator" and then File > Open... > and browse to the game's folder and type RESOURCE.CFG in the file name field. After you edit the file, you should have right permissions.
If you still can't save it, check that the file is not set to read only. GOG shouldn't have set it to read only, but who knows.

There are occasional pops in the original recording, unfortunately. They're uncommon, but still noticeable. It was 1993, and they had a lot of dialogue to fit on one CD; you can't really fault them for that.
Changing the SB device will help if you're hearing a background crackle every time someone opens their mouth. That was driving me nuts with Phantasmagoria, so thanks a lot for the solution!

The problem is not the original recording, but the highly flawed Sierra SoundBlaster drive.

I am having sound quality issues myself, but when I try this fix, it gives an error on startup and sound does not play. I look at the directory, and see that the file (DACTHUND.DRV) does not exists at all.
I am on Windows 7 64 bit, if that matters.

I just realized that the OP might have been talking about the first game. I was talking about the second.
Looks like I may need to just deal with it.
EDIT: Okay, starting the game proper, it isn't so bad.

I'm having a similar problem in GK2. During dialog (and the music does it too, though it's less noticeable) a syllable or 2 will be replaced with a chirp, which I suspect is the sound sped up. GK1 did it too, but it wasn't as much of a problem since there were subtitles.
I was tinkering around with the GK2 settings, and I accidentally lost my backup of RESOURCE.CFG and now I can't even get the game to launch. Can anyone possibly post the default settings here?
Edit: Nevermind. I found working settings and can get it to launch now. Still chirping away, though.

For future reference, you can run INSTALL.EXE to generate a new RESOURCE.CFG. Here is what should be in it:
videoDrv = VESA.DRV
soundDrv = MIDNONE.DRV
audioDrv = DACBLAST.DRV
joyDrv = NO
directory = .\
cmd = GK2DOS
mouseDrv = NONE
memoryDrv = NONE
minMemory = 1600k
brightness = 0
language = 1
minCPU = 486
smartdrv = YES
language = 351

resAUD = .\
resSFX = .\
resMAP = .\
rescdisc = .\
patchDir = .\PATCHES
movieDir = .\movies
robot = .\robot
and the dosboxGK2.conf:
[sdl]
output= overlay
fullresolution=0x0
autolock= true
fullscreen= true
[cpu]
core= normal
cycles= 10000
[autoexec]
cls
@ECHO OFF
mount C "."
c:
cd \
SIERRA.EXE .\resource.cfg
exit

Excellent. Thanks!

I'm having the same issue with GK1. Every so often, the characters sound like chipmunks for a split-second and it's really annoying. Thank goodness for the subtitles.

I tried to change to dacthund but now my sound is lagging even though i changed back!

Just a suggestion:

Try ScummVM (www.scummvm.org) - the Daily Snapshot should be able to play GK1. I don't know how perfect GK1-support is but the last time I tried it looked very good.

Note: It's not officially supported yet so you have to download a Snapshot NOT the standard 1.2 Windows version (just scroll way down on the download page).

In the dosbox config file set cycles to auto instead of 10000... it worked on me. Hope it helps.

Wow thank you so so much! I'd tried just about everything to make the voices play correctly and this fixed it right up! You don't know how disappointed I was when I opened the game up to find the static covered music and even worse, glitch pitted dialog. But thanks to you and soundprob/anonymous both are working near perfectly, probably about as well as they ever did. Thanks again!