I verified all my distances were correct and I have been playing with a center distance of zero with all other distances being relative off the center distance. Note this is simliar to the setup described in the manual for room distances greater than 20 feet so I felt comfortable with subtracting the center speaker distance. At a distance of zero the sound from the 970 is almost aligned with the TV AND the lip movement displayed on the TV.

I've yet to try the zero distance with the blue ray player (7.1 channel analog) to see if I've screwed that up.

I need to play with this some more to understand what is going on but it seems to be directionally correct.

Sounds like you are on the right track. I'm curious, though - why run both the TV speakers and the processor at the same time?

I have it wired both ways so I can watch the cable/TV without powering up the whole HT system. When I do power up everything then TV and HT speakers are both on at the same time, which is how I originally noticed the issue. The TV video and audio always seemed to be aligned so I started using it as the "standard" to measure the 970 delays. I don't actually watch anything with them both running.

It just struck me as I was typing that I can probably do the same thing for bluray using the HDMI audio which I run direct to the TV to compare against the 7.1 analog audio fed into the 970.