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.

This heinously-complex beast is tamed by Denon's spanking new graphic user interface, which is gorgeous to behold and ĂĽber-slick to use. It neatly guides you through every step of setup and function without even a glimpse at the manual - and the unified interface for inputs such as USB/MP3, iPod (via an optional dock) and internet radio make it pretty damn seamless.

Wi-fi-mare

What I found not so seamless was getting the wi-fi working. The robust wi-fi module and HDCP-compatible network setup make finding your wi-fi network easy, but the auto-connect feature simply refused to hookup to my system.

Having fiddled with just about every setting in the AVR-4308's network config, I gave up, hooked up an Ethernet bridge to the wired input and connected in seconds. I suspect the issue with the wireless networking may have been some sort of pilot-error but it did highlight that the system is certainly not plug-and-play fool-proof.

There are no such problems with the DAB radio, which proves to have a decent signal pull with the supplied antenna and populates the channel listings with ease. In the duff DAB area of East Sussex, though, there is plenty of drowning and warbling across all but the BBC channels, so clearly a roof-mounted twig will be the best option for critical DAB listening.