I meant to offer some info on this, but forgot to.
From what I can tell, Stereo 5 and Stereo 7 spread the left and right channels along the left and right sides (surround, surround back) and do some blending to feed the center channel.
In stereo bypass mode, you may not be using the digital bass management (depending on how you have it set up). Pro Logic II does use the 950's bass management, so low frequency from "small" speakers does go to the sub. (The only modes that do not use the digital bass management are stereo bypass and the six-channel analog input.) Analog cables are required to use the stereo bypass mode, since it uses that input's analog stereo input as the source and bypasses all A/D and D/A processing. Also, the VCR and tape outputs and the zone 2 output all also require analog connections to work.
If you are using your DVD player for listening to CD's and want to use stereo bypass mode for that, you will need to connect the player with analog cables. (You are correct in not wanting to use the analog cables for DVD watching -- you want toe 950 to do the decoding of the discs' Dolby Digital or DTS audio, which requires the digital audio connection.) When I used the 950's remote, I had two macros set up that were similar to what you are looking to do. One would switch to the six-channel analog input for DVD-Audio; the same thing can be done to enable the stereo bypass mode. Details of how are in my
950 review .
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