Hands up how many of you bought an HD Ready TV long before there were any meaningful HD sources? Yah, me too - it's all about wanting the best and future-proofing your home cinema system. Anyway, if that is a philosophy to which you subscribe, then have I got something for you...

Onkyo's TX-SR875 is the first AV receiver to feature on-board decoding for all the key sound formats appearing on Blu-ray and HD DVD discs - namely Dolby True HD and DTS HD of the Master-Audio variety.

In true Onkyo tradition this receiver is ahead of the game, well-specified and, in terms of more traditional features per pound, competes head-on with models from other manufacturers up to £1400. Fabulous, put me down for one. No, make it two - I'll get one for the bedroom as well.

Long live analogue

Well, I would if I could find anything to play through it. Just like buying that HD TV a few years back, Onkyo's on-board HD sound decoding is hamstrung by a critical lack of anything to feed it.

Yes, all Blu-ray and HD DVD players handle these formats, but at the time of writing not one of them output it as a bitstream over HDMI to the amp.

They all decode these formats internally and output as multichannel LPCM or, slap me around the face with the ancient-history fish, analogue 7.1 channel, albeit in new glorious uncompressed form. I'm not actually sure I have that many phono audio leads anymore...

Come Christmas this year there will be a few HD disc-spinners in the shops able to do HD-audio bitstream output over HDMI, with probably an Onkyo model being the first to market. The good news for anyone with a Blu-ray or HD DVD player now is that many (but not all) are capable of taking a firmware update later on that will enable the bitstream output.

Thankfully HD audio decoding is not the only feature to get star billing on the SR875. It packs a THX Ultra2 badge - a rarity on receivers below £1,000 - plus Audyssey's full MultEQ Room EQ system and Hollywood Quality Video (HQV) processing courtesy of a Reon-VX chipset, the world's first AV receiver to sport one.

For those keen to put another three letter acronym in their home cinema vocabulary, HQV is a high-quality de-interlacer with pixel-based noise reduction and detail enhancement. What does it do for HD video coming into the SR875, I hear you ask? Not a lot, basically. On the other hand, it does a very fine job of upscaling standard-def video sources, so that your HDTV or projector makes them look damn near as good as the genuine article.

The worse your display is at handling standard-definition television fare - and there are plenty of complete SD dogs out there - the better a picture you should get running your video sources (Freeview, standard Sky, DVD etc) through the Onkyo. There is some fabulous irony in the fact that this receiver's star technology feature, namely HD audio decoding, is currently unusable, while it's most jaw-dropping ability is too improve a duff standard-def analogue picture. Progress - you got to love it.

Hot stuff baby

Damn this receiver is hot. No really, it gets hot - and I mean 'pass me two eggs and a couple of rashers for a fry-up' hot. This may have something to do with a per-channel power output of 150W in 5.1 mode; the enormous transformer; or more likely what Onkyo describes as 'Dual Push-Pull amplification with three-stage inverted Darlington circuitry.'