Hey Mike, thanks for taking the time to reply. Appreciate it.

logstar: I don't really care to attain THX surround sound from a laptop, far from it. I was just trying to ascertain whether this was just a problem with a small number of MacBook Pro's or just some people that are overly picky. Personally I am not too fussy. I'd only be concerned if there was an actual hardware problem after paying such amounts of money for a laptop.