CD music works, unit calls work, menu background loop plays only once but works, mission pack intros have sounds. However, main game intros (viewed via intro button in the menu) are muted.
Anyone getting this too?

1 part - ToPwArE!!. watched, mute
2 part - Text scroll. watched, mute.
3 part - city, tank. started watching but skipped, since it was mute too.
Didn't have any effect on in-mission music either.

I also had this problem. Surprisingly, the sound in the main intro (the third part) only doesn't play if I let the first two parts finish. Whenever I skip the first to parts I have sound in the third one.

Finally after reinstall i have the game going, all sounds present. However, is there a way to use cheats? I cant deny it, some missions are deadly without them...

I have audio not working seemingly at random (cuts in or out at the start of a menu screen, movie or gameplay), but sometimes pressing esc in the menu screen also cuts it off. The game requires dozens of restart attempts (fails on audio initialization) on my PC so that is probably related. When audio works is sounds very crackly and distorted (both audio and redbook audio).

Also the start menu shortcut for SETUP points to a non-existing .conf file and effectively just starts DOSBox.

Specs: I7 975, X-Fi titanium, W7/64.

Yeah I have this problem also, pretty much exactly the same. Have to keep pressing "Y" in the Dos start-up because "sound card failed to initialize", sometimes up to a dozen or more times before it finally works and goes to the game. And even when in-game the unit calls become muted occasionally while the CD music doesn't seem affected. Also the menu sounds often mute if I move around in the game menu from side to side.

I noticed these exact problems are noted on DOSBox' compatibility page for Earth 2140, and apparently for quite a while. This does not bode well for a possible fix...

Ok, I've played around a bit with dosboxe2140.conf, and if you are having audio stutters and distortion like I had, these values fixed it for me:

blocksize=1024
prebuffer=50

I also had audio drop-outs and needed a *lot* of retries to initialize the game. Changing cycle settings to:

cycles=60000

Seemed to to balance it out for me. The game now almost always starts at the first attempt and audio drop-out is a lot less frequent.

Also, is the gog "Graphic mode setup" (the DOSbox configurator) in the Earth 2140 DOS folder not supposed to work or something? I tried changing some settings and it just gave me a "Game not installed" error.

This does work for me. The program does need administrator rights though, and I don't have it installed in C:\Program Files (x86)\ which could also make a difference.

Ahhh got it working, works fine if I run it from the Earth folder in the start menu.

But it would be good if GoG could maybe tweak the DOS version install to eliminate the CD initialization errors and cut-outs in-game.