Unity keeps altering my audio asset on import...?

When I import my sound loop (of the sound a ball makes when it rolls on a hard surface) into Unity, Unity adds about 1/5th of a second of silence at the beginning of the sound and maybe 1/10th of a second of silence at the end. That in itself seems totally random to me.

In my audio editor, there is no such silence visible (or audible) in the waveform. It is a perfect loop. However, in the waveform shown in the Unity inspector, you can see the short silence at the beginning and shorter silence at the end. And of course, you can hear the silence when it plays. I thought maybe Unity was using some kind of cached earlier and messed up version of the sound file and wasn't reimporting properly, but even when I import it as different file names it doesn't change matters at all.

Has anyone ever had this little issue before?

I've "fixed" it by attaching a script that basically says "if the time of the sound is less than 0.1 second, go straight to 0.1 second, and if it's higher than the duration minus 0.1 second, go to 0.1 second". Works great, but that's really just hiding the symptoms, not curing the problem.

Is there some sort of file format that Unity doesn't like for sound loops? The loop is in MP3 format, and is a pretty crappy bit rate (Think in the neigborhood of ~50kbps) because the source unfortunately had to be recorded that way, but I don't see how that would have anything to do with it.

My script fixes the problem, but I'd like a real fix if one exists just because it bugs me to have to remember to apply a script to every single loop. :(