Sound problem--- what the heck?

okay i’ve got my main timeline which has a sound object created in first frame and called to start playing on a later frame:

_root.background1.start(0,999); 
_root.background1.setVolume(20);

i’ve got external .swf’s loaded into my main timeline and the sounds in those .swfs are playing super quiet or not at all. (they test fine until I test my main .swf that loads them)

I’m not a sound object pro yet, but is my sound object affecting the sounds in my loaded .swfs?

anyone encountered this type of problem before?

thanks for any help