OK - I've been doing a bit more searching and found a few interesting tidbits on setting up the BE player with analog outputs.

I see that if I set the speaker size to small, the LFE signal is dropped by 5db, this in addition to an already low (-10db) recording for LFE. I think that the 990 has a setup option that is something like 'analog offset for subwoofer'. I suppose that here I would dial up the subwoofer input for when I am listening to analog inputs? Perhaps I'll play with large/small setting on the BD player for my 7.1 input.

Also, I see that I have to move away from PCM to bitstream/encoded.

Hmmm... I can see I have another afternoon of re-connecting wires and playing around with things.