Late-comer to the thread, after noticing some activity in the Active Topics sidebar on the 673 and thinking "hey I have a 773 - I'm sure there will be a thread here for it"...
Like many others here, I could not resist Newegg's $440+$2 deal.
Interesting to catch up on two years of posts.
The RX-V773WA comes bundled with a USB powered wireless bridge. The RX-V773 doesn't.
As far as I know the RX-V773WA is only available in the United States. Canada, Australia and the rest of the world get the WiFi-less RX-V773.
You should be able to find cheap wireless access point that can act as a wireless bridge for $50 or less.
The non- North America models also have a
phono stage. If I knew beforehand I think I woulda' tried to get one imported somehow.
Since I have a bunch of Ethernet -capable stuff in the "home theater" areas of the apartment, instead of a crapload of WiFi nodes competing with each other I set aside the (predictably notorious) YWA thing and installed a Netgear WNCE4004 WiFi bridge in each area. With 4 ports, just enough for the receiver, BDP, TV, and a PC. Or in the other room, a DVR, game console and PC. Great throughput with my Asus RT-AC66U. TIP: If you have very close neighbors with WiFi, 5 GHz can save much grief. YMMV.
The Z-fan is a home theater component fan by Elan Home Systems. As it's 15 years old, the new ones (Z-Fan2) are somewhat more sophisticated. You can find some of the model I have on eBay at (some) decent prices. I THINK it was originally $115 but might have been more. They came either standalone or as rack-mounters. This is a pretty quiet dual fan -- can be heard in a quiet room, but not with soft chamber music set at -48 db.
Ooof, that's a lot of money for a couple of fans in a case design that is prone to increasing turbulence noise at the cost of lowering air volume movement.
But yeah, a lot of folks have little grasp of how much the lifetime of their hardware can be reduced by heat. Stacks of H/T stuff without some plan to move some air across and through it is a recipe for trouble.
Good news is, there is a huge market for quiet PC components and that means super quiet 120mm - 180mm fans can be had easily and cheaply. Trash-pick a 12V power brick, plug it into your smart strip and use it to power a few low-speed $5-$15 PC case fans mounted with silicone bits. Cheap, effective if you place 'em right, and if you do it right you won't even hear them over the noise floor of your listening area, much less quiet chamber music passages. Tip: If you can place them out of the way of busy fingers, don't use fan grilles! Better airflow with low-speed fans and one less source of turbulence noise.
Anyway, on to miscellaneous stuff...
Irritations:
The inability to independently route
certain sources to Zones 1 and 2 or do anything that remotely resembles D/A between ins and outs is frustrating and stupid. The capability is there and intentionally disabled to force you to spend more for Yamaha's $1000+ receivers. It even goes so far as to sense when you try to plug an output to an input and interferes. Bastards! Not that there aren't work-arounds...
The two HDMI outputs are tied. So if you do something sneaky like putting an inexpensive HDMI-Analog adapter on HDMI OUT 2, it drags both HDMI outputs to 720p.
In spite of a few things like that, I'm generally happy.
It runs a LOT cooler than my old Pioneer. That thing was a coffee warmer just idling!
I totally forgot there was an HTTP interface to this unit. I like using Yamaha's iPhone app. Makes handling zones and sources much easier.
Noticed there's new firmware 1.91 from last July available. Thinking about braving it..! Right now the iPhone app doesn't always see the receiver.