Latency in playing short sounds in Flash 9, Actionscript 3

I've got a few very short audio clips (less than a second long) to be played on various events (button hover, click, etc). However, there is usually a significant lag between the action and the actual playing of the sound. I have tried both embedding the sound in the .swf, and loading it externally at the start, but both lead to the same results. Likewise, I've tried with compressed and uncompressed audio.

What it seems like is that the audio buffers are just a lot longer than I need them to be, like perhaps Flash is optimized more towards playing longer sounds without any stutter at the expense of a little more latency in starting sounds. Could this be it? Is there any way to change them? Since what I'm working on will never need to play sounds more than a second or so long and will always be loaded completely at the start, it wouldn't hurt it at all to have really short buffers.

One other possible thing that might be the cause: if I use .wav files when using loadSound()… I can't get it to actually play the sounds. There's no errors, and everything returns as it should, but no actual sound is played, which is why I have them as .mp3 currently. Perhaps when using .mp3 audio (or any compressed audio), there just will be lag in decoding it? The reason I still have doubts about this, though, is that when embedding them in the .swf as .wav files (by importing them into the library), they still have the same latency on playback.

Just for a sanity check, I'll include the code I've got, minus irrelevant parts and error checking. First, loading them at runtime:

var soundArray:Array = new Array();
loadSound( "click", "sounds/buttondroop4.mp3" );
loadSound( "hover", "sounds/Dink-Public_D-146.mp3" );

function loadSound( name:String, url:String ):void
{
   var req:URLRequest = new URLRequest( url );
   soundArray[ name ] = new Sound( req );
   soundArray[ name ].addEventListener( Event.COMPLETE, soundLoaded );
}
function soundLoaded( event:Event ):void
{
   for( var name:String in soundArray )
   {
      if( event.target == soundArray[name] )
      {
         trace( "Loaded sound [" + name + "]" );
         return;
      }
   }
}
function playSound( name:String ):void
{
   for( var nameSrc:String in soundArray )
   {
      if( name == nameSrc )
      {
         var channel:SoundChannel = soundArray[ name ].play();
         return;
      }
   }
}

// Sometime later, well after soundLoaded() callback is triggered...
playSound( "click" );
playSound( "hover" );

And an alternate way, embedding them in the library as classes and going from there:

var sClick:soundClick = new soundClick();
var sHover:soundHover = new soundHover();
sClick.play();
sHover.play();

The sound files are tiny, less than 10kb generally. The lag is apparent enough that one of the first complaints someone had when looking at it was that the sound effects on button hovers seemed delayed, so it wasn't just me being picky. I feel like I must just be doing something wrong; there's too many flash things out there that have snappy sound effects without anywhere near this kind of lag.

edit: In response to the first response about sound files themselves, I've already checked, and the sound starts immediately at the start of the file (even clipping out everything but the very first millisecond of sound, I can still hear the start of the 'tick' noise it makes).