This year Yamaha is also incorporating a feature that they call virtual cinema front in their receivers. According to Yamaha using the virtual cinema front mode gives you more fluidity with your speaker placement. If, for instance, all of your speakers are located in the front of your room, this feature will approximate surround sound. When we reviewed the Yamaha RX-V377 earlier this year we were able to test out this feature for ourselves. While the sound didn’t wrap around us the way it would with a true 5.1 system, it did widen the sound stage substantially.
All things considered the Yamaha RX-V777 has a nice list of features. When it’s finally released we hope to get our hands on one so that we can give it a proper shake down.