This year's CES (Consumer Electronics Show) brought dismay and disappointment in what the announcements for the new A/V receivers generations was concerned. Except for the Sherwood Newcastle, none of the major producers has said even a word on what is about to come. As I guess you have figured it out already, neither did Denon. Instead of that...

...some information and even a picture have somehow leaked so the new Denon receiver will no longer be such a total and complete surprise. At least about the Sherwood Newcastle piece we know now that it will be HD DVD-friendly since it already has a built-in support for Blu-ray discs and will most likely run with HDMI 1.3 connections.

The mysterious voice behind all this claimed that that the new Denon line, the "08" will consist of 5 products, 2 high-end due for July and 3 more "consumer" in September. Allegedly, the first two releases will sport 4 HDMI 1.3 connectors with internal support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD decoding, Ethernet connectivity and redesigned GUIs. Again, supposedly, their prices will be $2500 and $1600, respectively.

From the second-phase releases, one of the three consumer receivers, the AVR-2808 will offer HDMI 1.3 connectivity as well and internal support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD protocols. The other two will be stripped from this on-board audio decoders, but will most likely work with PCM data received via HDMI, since they will be HDMI 1.3 compliant.

Now about the possibility of things being this way, actually, it has become a custom for Denon to announce new stuff in July as they did last year, also in July, at CEDIA; even more, we're led into believing that the proper physical components needed for all the "built-in support" aren't ready yet... the Sherwood Newcastle have announced their introduction of HDMI 1.3 receivers somewhere this summer as well. I even expect there will be more than Denon and Sherwood Newcastle in the "HDMI 1.3 boat" at that time.

We can't do anything but wait and expect to see what will this summer bring us from Denon. Nevertheless, should things be the way the mystery source stated we'll probably be looking at some of the world's most desired home-audio pieces of equipment any producer has had to offer in a long time.

Photo credits to Unknown Photographer.