Lena,
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I still have no expertise to decipher how much center track information is repeated in the FL/FR tracks on a DVD-A when using the 6-channel passthru, or how much might be the 950 downmixing?
Having listened to a few discrete multi-channel music discs, I agree with you that this is not an easy thing to determine. I've found some albums to be mixed so that the vocals are only in the centre channel; others are mixed so that the vocals are spread gently across the front three channels; yet others have the vocals only in the front L/R channels with subtle instrumental fill in the centre channel. Then of course there's the DVD-A of Natalie Merchant's 'Tigerlily', where you can hear her from all the channels. It's louder in the front centre, but it definitely is the exact same vocal track (not backing vocals) in all 5.1 channels. I'm sure this made sense to someone, somewhere. But this sort of inconsistency makes it next to impossible, based on listening alone, to figure out if a downmix is happening.
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...after disconnecting center interconnect with 950 Center/large, Optical, DPLII-C. It was gutted!
That's to be expected with matrix decoding (like PL II and Neo:6), where the vocals extracted and sent specifically to the centre. But on discrete multi-channel mixes, where the vocals may not have been mixed into the centre channel, disconnecting the centre speaker may not cause the song to sound quite so "gutted" (if at all).

So Lena, instead disconnecting the centre speaker, let me ask you if you're willing to try something else. Follow:

If you set up the 950 as having no centre speaker, it is reasonable to assume that it'll split the centre channel content and send it to the front left & right channels. That means that you should hear the centre channel content coming out of the other two front speakers. But, as mentioned earlier, this may be hard to determine. However, setting the centre to "none" also means that nothing should be coming out of your centre speaker. Soooooo, if you could reach behind your front left & right speaker and simply detach the speaker wires, you'll only have the centre speaker operating up front. Make sense so far?

Now, having done that, set your 950 to "no centre" and play a DVD-A disc through the 6-channel analog inputs. Is anything coming out of your centre speaker?

Best,
Sanjay
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Sanjay