As an aside, you mentioned "24". If that was in reference to this past week's season-opening episodes, they were mixed pretty poorly. My wife and I both noticed that the first night was particularly bass heavy, and made the dialog extremely difficult to hear/comprehend. And we weren't using the HT set-up. We were using our Sony HDTV's built-in speakers.

Sorry that doesn't really help your issue, but should give you some peace of mind that the "24" issue was not your system!

Take care,
Rich