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.