We can prove this is the issue - if we head to Ford's lab while in state 7 but before meeting up with Lili (i.e. when he's standing on the entrance platform to the obeervation area) and PSI blast the core machine while closer to him, he speaks!

Furthermore, if you listen to the loom vs. the core collector, you can kind of tell that there's something different. The loom's dialogue seems to play in 2D whereas the dialogue when you hit the core collector seems to actually be coming from Ford. Hmmm...