I'm pretty sure the CD-ROM version of Loom uses Redbook audio tracks for the music and speech in the game.

There are multiple reasons why you may be having problems:
- When games tell Windows to play audio tracks from a CD, Windows always passes these commands to the first CD drive in your system (I don't remember if "first" means lowest-lettered or lowest bus position number). This means that only that drive can be used to play in-game CD audio tracks.
- If you don't have "Enable digital CD audio for this CD-ROM device" enabled in the Device Manager Properties for that CD drive, you'll need a cable going from your drive to your sound card (and then unmute the CD-ROM input of your sound card's mixer) to pass the audio track sound across. This box should be checked by default, however, as it works fine on all modern hardware and both produces (potentially) higher-quality audio and eliminates the need for an additional cable.
- I'm not sure why it wouldn't work in DOSBox. Maybe it's related to the first issue I mentioned, or maybe you need to use advanced mounting parameters like -ioctl. I think this may have been discussed in the context of another game somewhere on this forum a few weeks ago...
- For SCUMMVM, you also have the option of ripping the audio tracks to WAV/FLAC/MP3/OGG files and having it use those. The README probably has info on how to set this up. The advantage here is that you don't need the CD-ROM in the drive at all to play, eliminating the need to fuss with Windows' clunky CD audio support.

HunterZ is right about the audio track. You have to have VDMS set to run the game with low level CD-ROM support or SAPUCDEX. Even so, there may still be a problem with the audio syncing in XP. This is easily solved by ripping the audio track to the hard drive and running the game with ScummVM.

*** I Rewrote the thread's title to specify CD Version ***