I think it's a matter of scale, Dan. Adding true discrete 7.1 in the last month of production (or in this case during the last weeks of testing and beginning of full scale production) seems unrealistic. This is particularly true if they would need to develop the decoding themselves (I'm not real up on Lexicon's 7.1, but I don't know how readily they license it out to other manufacturers). They've already crammed a lot more formats into the 950 than they originally planned to, and without changing the initial cost of the unit. Some of the features that you mention may be ones they have on their wish list for the planned high-end pre/pro, which they apparently don't plan to push too far along until they can integrate things like digital input from DVD-A/SACD and some other undisclosed features that are not ready for prime time yet. Discrete 7.1 may very well be on that list. As for your idea of steering the left and right surround signals to the rears of a 7.1 speaker setup, it is an interesting idea. Do you know of any manufacturers who have included it or plan to?