Horrible sound quality on DVD playback and live TV

[highball]

Quick question: I have an ATI all-in-wonder 9600xt on an MSI K7N2-L motherboard with an AMD athlon xp 3200+ processor. I'm using the onboard audio. I have a WD200JB 200 gig hard drive. 512 of ddr400 ram. Anyway, I just burned one of my recordings to DVD using pinnacle studio and the audio was horrible. Scratchy, mono (not stereo), barely could hear the conversations in the show. I have the settings at 48khz and 224000. I'm not sure if this is a hardware problem with the onboard audio or a beyond tv problem. I've never had good sound output even when watching live tv. any ideas?

[gdub]

There's another thread on this very subject named "Sound quality, and stereo sound". I've got an ASUS motherboard with on-board SoundMax. Sound quality is horrible with MPEG-2. I've upped the bitrate for WMV to 256K (from 128K) and the sound is quite tolerable, but I lose the ability to pause Live TV. No solution as yet. BTV tech support has advised installing a sound card, but that doesn't make sense when WMV records (and plays back) good quality audio. In any case, I used to use ATI MMC9 with the same hardware, and the sound quality was fine.

BTW, 48kHz and 224Kb should be way more than adequate for good quality audio.