Every now and then the audio industry shudders, shakes and evolves. Shedding its old skin like a snake, it emerges with a raft of new products that really shake up the home cinema market.

The result is a new wave of kit (home cinema v2.0?) that pushes the envelope in terms of features and performance and leaves cinephiles with no option but to take once-revered reference kit outside to be shot. Well, okay, put on eBay. 2008 is destined to be the year of next-gen AV; everyone of note is using new technology to raise their game. Not least Denon, with its dramatic new AVR-4308.

For the sake of balance and fairness - as I am about to rave about this receiver - I shall start with some token negatives. The wireless networking on this two-grand grandee is a bitch to setup and the front knobs are disappointingly plasticky. And furthermore... no, actually, that's pretty much it.

In terms of features, Denon's AVR-4308 leaves few boxes unchecked. It's got v1.3 HDMI with twin outputs; video scaling to 1080p; decoding for all the current HD audio formats from DTS and Dolby; and a built-in DAB tuner.

It's fully-networked with both Ethernet and built-in wi-fi; handles everything from MP3s to FLAC-encoded music files; offers Internet Radio V2.0 (giving access to a server with over 7,000 stations); and can stream music from a PC or media server. And then there is four-zone multiroom with two remote controls - a nice backlit device and a none-too-shoddy second zone job with 100 per cent functionality.

Auto-setup goes without saying, of course, and you even get the full-fat Audyssey MultEQ XT room equaliser with full manual tweaking control. One obvious omission is the lack of THX certification - which denies the user a whole heap of superior post processing.

On the plus side, the unit is seriously juicy. In two-channel mode this thing delivers 173W per channel, dropping to just 130W with five channels driven. The power plant consists of three independent power supplies and a host of widgets by famous names such as Faroudja, Sharc and NSV. The internals are solidly put together and well thought out, and the back panel is a regular cornucopia of connectivity.