Controlling Sound in loaded SWF's

I have a button on my main scene which creates the varaiable “soundoff”, then if one of the placed swf’s when loaded detect the variable it stops all sounds,

if(soundoff == true){
stopAllSounds();

This works fine but does not target sounds placed in movieclips in the loaded swf’s timeline. I’ve tried targeting them with the _root. command and using linkage but I can only stop the sound in the main timeline level.

Any ideas as usual will be greatly appreciated.

Mhunki