I finally got to the marketplace in Cyseal (and even toured the entire town) to see what all the complaining about.
I didn't hear anything even remotely annoying with the voice volume or frequency. Certainly nothing as bad as this thread makes it sound. To me, the market sounded like a marketplace (and the friend I was playing with also agreed). It's not supposed to sound like a library. And I didn't have a problem hearing the personal conversations I was having (with other NPCs, nor with my friend on voice-chat).
I really feel some of you are blowing this out of proportion. Maybe the volume could scale down more quickly with range, but I personally don't see anything drastic needing to happen here.
Now, I will say that the one place the voices do tend to get both loud and annoying is in closed environments where a lot of reverb occurs. I think the amount of echo is over the top.
Like thisisnighthawk said, it's not about the volume, it's about the incessant loop of same phrases.
