Lena,

"But since I paid so much for the damm thing (center).and like it. I intend to ‘use’ it, (most of the time)"

Heh.. yeah I can understand that!
I always had a center in my past systems (well... at least since prologic first came out), but once I hit the higher end with signal quality and speakers (like you are at yourself) I sold my last center speaker and wasn't interested in getting a new one.

You actually might NOT want to try using a phantom center on any DVD's, even for a test.
It might make you wish you spent the center speaker cost on something like a new DAC to further improve your 2 chan. CD's.

If you do wanna test it though, try ANY DVD. It doesn't matter if it's the Matrix or not (I was just saying 'yeah' when you first said it).

Actually a quiet dialouge-heavy (sp?) flick might be a better test.
Probably more difficult for a phantom center to pull off than a sound effect heavy flick with lots 'o stuff spread out to all the speakers.

And the cool thing about that test is that it's so fast and easy to switch the 950's center on and off, and replay the same DVD scene both ways.

No guessing about the diff. you heard like you might do if you have to get up, switch cables, adjust volume, junk like that that makes directly comparing stuff so hard.

I say 'no more lending people your DVD's' too if they don't give 'em back to you. That's low. You're probably just being 'too nice' IMO. heh

That seems like a definitive answer now that you heard that one little 'so' from the center on track 4. I'll have to listen for that on my CD of it, and listen if they did any phase tricks to put sounds in a phantom surround. Probably not, but they could have.

You'll have to try that Roger Waters CD to hear this phantom surround effect. It's amazing. I think some Madonna stuff is recorded in Q-Sound too, but I don't listen to her. You probably don't listen to the Heavy Metal band 'Tool', but there's a lot of this effect on their CD's too even though they're not listed as Q-Sound.

I think it's just a matter of recording a specific layer of sound and varying the phase. 180 degrees and it sounds like it's coming from your rear speakers (~20 degrees behind you), while everything recorded normal (in-phase) images up front like you'd expect it to. It can move from front to back and vice-versa too.