It there a way to improve sound, so that the music doesn't soudn louder than the speech? I can't make out what some voiceovers are saying in the introduction cutscene, because the music becomes way too loud.

Getting Roland sound definitely improves the sound. Check out the sticky for details.

Alright its a big thread, I tried one of the suggestions on the first page.

It ended up making it much easier to hear the speech, but I had another problem.

For whatever reason I'm hearing speech in one ear of my headphones, and music in the other.

This is disconcerting, particulary since once you get into the game proper, there is only music, and I don't want to be listening out of only one ear, LOL.

That's weird, never heard about that problem before.
Personally I play without music though, since I think it's out of place in 1st person single character games.

Well I still don't want to hear sound effects only out of one ear, that's very weird.

Well I figured it out and got it working.

Excellent.
What was the issue and how did you fix it?

Tried someone else's cfg options, mentioned in the thread..

Actually running on adlib settings for sound makes the speech louder.

Then I tried out the suggestions for running MT32 emulation with Munt and Putz. Which actually really does improve the sound quality. However, that just causes the music to be really loud again. But since I already watched the intro with adlib sound, so I could hear what was being said, its no big deal.