Is there any way to control the stereo balance of the audio playback I cant find any controls/settings that allow this...not all of us have perfectly balanced ears
Apparently there is such an app that can do this (see this XDA post).

However, it's my understanding that to do this would require at minimum a rooted phone, and probably a custom kernel as well.  I don't know of any custom kernels that have this functionality, however.  You could also buy headphones with separate L/R volume controls.