Carbon internal talkback distored

[table17]

The quality of the talkback system on my Carbon seems wayyy off, in a bad way. Does the talkback system sound "okay" to anyone else?

For me, the amount of cooling-fan noise from inside the Carbon makes the talkback nearly unusable. But worse, and with gain in Hardware Setup set to lowest setting of 0dB, the system is quick to distort. If I talk with any amount of extra volume in my voice, about 1 foot away from the unit, it's overdrive city.

I've tried to test this on the Carbon's internal headphone amps, also routed outputs to external headphone distribution amps. All results are sub-par, to say the least.