We saw Sony's new STR-DA5800ES home cinema receiver in prototype form at IFA in Berlin last August, but now Sony's technical guru Eric Kingdon says tuning is complete and the product is ready to go on sale. It will cost around £2250.
It replaces the STR-DA5700ES, is a 9.2 channel design with built-in 4K upscaling and should be available before the end of this month.
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There are numerous improvements over the current model, including a new power supply, improved DSP (digital signal processing) engine, two additional channels of amplification for adding extra front height channels, or biamping, and a second zone HDMI output.
It's fully network capable with an ethernet socket around the back, will support multichannel 192kHz/24-bit audio and has a special 'lift-up' function for the centre channel.
The latter means that if your centre speaker is placed beneath the screen, you can set it so the dialogue is 'raised' to sound as if it's coming from the centre of the screen, not below it.
