Hello, I really don't like the voice acting on Loom, I find it ruins the atmosphere, and would much rather have just the text to read as in the old days. Unfortunately the scummvm system options don't allow me to select for this, or even to simply turn the speech volume off. Perhaps there is another way to do this in the directory file? Any help will be much appreciated!

Unfortunately, the CD version of loom had all its sounds in one long audio track on the CD. There is no way you could separate the speech from the rest of the sound. Later LucasArts "talkie" games could, but not Loom.

I do wish GOG would provide at least the 16-color EGA version of the game, seeing how that is the author's preferred version of the game. See for instance this interview from last year. He had some further comments about the differences in the CD version in a Classic Game Postmortem at GDC 2015 which you can watch on YouTube [1] or the GDC Vault. It's almost an hour long, but the latter link has a handy index.

Even the audio drama mentioned in the manual isn't included with the GOG version. Apparently there's some rights issue? In an earlier thread someone did try to raise that question with Disney, but I guess nothing came from it.

[1] The forum keeps mis-rendering the link, but it's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1aVDael-KM