During the video squences the game emits a crackling sounds which makes it very hard if not possible to understand what is said.
Don't have this problem with any other games from GOG.com.
Vista x64
Creative soundcard

Goto Start, Accesories, click run. Type dxdiag. Click the sound tab. Drag the Hardware Acceleration bar to "Basic". There's still a little bit of crackling, but it's easily playable.

I just disabled the Win95 compatability mode GOG set up... it plays fine and the sound issues are almost all gone.

Too bad I can't disable that. Windows doesn't want to remember my settings for that shortcut.

This completely solved the sound issue for me. I was really disappointed with this purchase because the sound kept clicking and repeating in places incessantly. But after I applied this the game is now solved. So now that my faith was restored in purchasing Myst Masterpiece I will probably buy Riven when it comes out on GOG, even though I already own every Myst game.

Thanks. SingingVelvet's solution worked.

I forgot to mention that I have Windows 7 64 bit with a creative card (Sound Blaster X-Fi Music). The original poster also has Vista 64 bit with a creative card. Maybe this is the issue with the crackling sound because we both have 64 bit OS's. None the less I'm very pleased it now works (I'm surprised actually considering the game is so old and it's now working on Windows 7 64 Bit) and my $6 did not go to waste.

Yes, I too ran into the issue while running Win 7 x64. I'll probably wait for the re-issued installer but of course I might just get impatient and do the registry hack. Either way, it's just nice to have a working version on modern operating systems. I tried to install my DVD version of Masterpiece Edition last year on Vista x64 and it was a big no go due to quicktime incompatibilities.
Keep 'em coming GoG and I will keep buying them.
...bysmitty

I had the same problem and It was even worse since the game was sluggish and sloppy like my hardware wasn't good enough to run this ten year old game. I was very disappointed with the purchase at the beginning but after disabling the compatibility mode it works fine. You guys should test games a bit more carefully...

Thank you very very much StingingVelvet. .

Still having the sound issues personally, even after setting hardware sound acceleration to Basic and turning compatibility mode off.
It definitely is a little better without making the changes, but I still get a constant static in the audio.
I'm sure it's an unsupported configuration but I'm running Windows XP 32bit in a VMWare Fusion virtual machine on my mac.
It's playable, but the audio leaves much to be desired.