When I use asterisks to show multiplication they frequently disappear and weird formatting appears. Is there a way to change this? It makes writing equations kind of messy with all the brackets (I refuse to use x for multiplication in case someone suggests that).

e.g. (4)((8)(3) + (34)(1+5(4))) is harder to read than the version with asterisks, but when I use asterisks I get:
4(83 + 34(1+54))

which is not quite the same thing :)