I played and play again, TWP on a 42" TV and I have the sound over a Yamaha Dolby Digital/DTS Receiver on good Teufel Surround Speakers that can deliver HiFI very well, too. I can´t say there was and is anything unsatisfying.
It´s the oposite.
It sounds great.
Maybe you should try something like this. If you only tried laptop speakers (!) you really did not get what is in the Game.
Even if it is a Mac, using laptop speakers and talking about the music quality sounds a little bit strange to me, I´m sorry.
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I agree. Several months ago, there was a discussion about lossless audio and lossy audio - and I didn’t immediately understand what would have been wrong with lossless. But, I’m very content with the sound in TWP.
CMI had a really bad sound quality, though.
It is something I thought about, but it would have increased the 800M download size by 5x. I already have people complaining to be about the download size of the game.
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A famous german computer magazine (called c’t) has made a test with several MP3 compression levels (and I think OGG was part of the test too…). The result was: If you chose a bitrate over AFAIR 128k even good ears can’t decide if the music was compressed or not.
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Personally, I believe this to be true no matter how hard Neil Young tries to convince me otherwise.
Well, it’s clear that the files that take more space are the audio files, but if you want to decrease a bit the size of the whole game, you could (losslessly) optimize the PNG files. It’s difficult to say how many bytes you would save, let’s say between 30M and (an optimistic) 50Mbytes.
btw: Unfortunately download sizes are matter in several parts of Germany. Especially on the countryside many households still have only a small bandwidth - because they just can’t get a faster one.
I absolutely understand that. As @Someone wrote above, we might be unable to notice the difference anyway. Most people complaining about the sound quality of this game just make a wrong diagnosis, unless the bit-rate is too low, which in my opinion doesn’t seem to be the case.
Maybe some of us are using high-end equipment and assert that there was a difference, but, if so, they might face this problem with almost every other contemporary game as well.
@Ron Gilbert
I don’t know if you have plans on enhancing the sound design generally but how much trouble would you expect for offering two versions (desktop)? This way you could offer a small (file size friendly) and a big (audio friendly) version. Monkey Island varies as well (Floppy DOS, FM-Towns, Second Edition).
I think my only issue with the music was that the radio station is supposedly playing a song by Razor and the Scummettes, and it’s not the punk rock I always imagined. 
Discussing about codecs, I keep getting surprised with OPUS. I can’t really tell the difference of OPUS@96kbps on my average Sennheiser headphones with lossless.
There was also a listening test in http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm that pretty much agrees with my subjective test. Being someone who has been converting music since 1998 and those awful first free mp3 encoders, finding transparency at 96kbps is truly amazing.
And I tried and converted all the podcasts to OPUS@24kpbs. The compression in the voice parts is indistinguishable from the original… And @12kbps the loss of quality is something you completely forget about after a few seconds. And I got all the 24 hours of podcasts in 114MB!
I think the music score is great and atmospheric. The only issues I have with the sound of the game are those related to SDL which cause the dialog to pan hard to one side or the other occasionally, and some nitpicky ones related to the mix balance across all channels.
For instance, I find the crisp and clear quality of the in-game voices on the telephone completely incongruous with how telephones sound – especially after dialing with (I guess) accurate DMFT tones, which are squarely in the limited band range of a telephone signal, and serve to set the mood. To me it felt rather jarring to follow the tones with regular, unmodulated voice recordings. I found it broke my immersion more than once until I got used to it.
Like I said, purely nitpicky, since none of this is consequential to the rest of the game.
dZ.
I think the question persists: did you or did you not try the game on a different computer with high quality headphones?
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I think I answered this already. The sound issues aren’t hardware related here, they’re on TWP’s side (source material, production, sound design, compression, SDL, whatever).
It’s interesting that some people here supposedly can’t hear these things because they’re so obvious.
There aren’t obvious because they aren’t there. 
It seems that you are the only one that has these issues.
There are some issues with the sound design. In my opinion they are not all that pronounced, but I can see why they would be noticeable to an audiophile. By the same token, I can see how they could be completely missed by those used to listening to over-compressed, over-processed, low bit-rate mp3 files.
I disagree with @ideal’s tone and confrontational choice of words, but the response should neither be “everything is perfect, you’re making it up.”
dZ.
Yes, for example I agree with the panning issue. But @ideal criticized the sound quality in general and the music in particular. And I can’t agree especially with the latter one.
This is not valid at least for me: I’m using professional audio equipment and I hear no compression artifacts in the TWP sound or music. (And as I said above: If you chose a high bitrate no one is able to hear the difference to uncompressed music.)
Can you give an example where you can hear the “bad” music quality?
Im playing on a MacBook Air with Apple earphones. It’s great.
I can confirm that the sound is crystal clear on my equipment…
…what?
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I use a good SoundFont uploaded to a X-Fi Creative card. Does not sound terrible, if the MIDI is great it sound quite good. PC game industry went away from that route, I suspect cause soundcards back then could not handle those large (250+ MB) good sounding SoundFonts. Few has dedicated hardware soundcards these days that can actually do that. Tried playing same soundfont with software emulator, on a PC which only has standard Intel mainboard soundcard with RealTek driver, just isn’t the same.