BRISTOL SHOW 2013: Sony STR-DA5800ES AV receiver to sell for £2250

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.

MORE: Sony announces two more new AV receivers for 2013

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.

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Andy Clough

Andy is Global Brand Director of What Hi-Fi? and has been a technology journalist for 30 years. During that time he has covered everything from VHS and Betamax, MiniDisc and DCC to CDi, Laserdisc and 3D TV, and any number of other formats that have come and gone. He loves nothing better than a good old format war. Andy edited several hi-fi and home cinema magazines before relaunching whathifi.com in 2008 and helping turn it into the global success it is today. When not listening to music or watching TV, he spends far too much of his time reading about cars he can't afford to buy.