dark_jedi said:

See, and I am getting grief over this, and being told my system "sucks balls" when I have been sampling a mono audio that "sucks balls".

This is not totally correct, in that even a good mono source played through the centre channel will sound poor. The centre channel not only gives you bad audio spread, but it's a very weak speaker. Ideally you should be playing it back through at least one left and one right tower/bookshelf speaker. So, it's more that your equipment setting sucks balls. I don't know why they put the default to be centre-channel though, that's probably a consequence of compromsing for 5.1 defaults or something.