Onkyo TX-NR5010 – Home Cinema

£3,000 is a hefty price tag, but you certainly get an awful lot of technology for your money. The TX-NR5010 is absolutely crammed full of features, to the point where you might wonder if you’ll ever get round to using it all.

Let’s start with this unit’s bread and butter – home cinema. This nine-channel receiver can decode every flavour of Dolby and DTS, as well as offering Dolby Pro Logic IIz, DTS Neo:X and Audyssey DSX processing to deliver atmospheric front height channels (and front width in the case of Neo:X and DSX). Power output is quoted as 220W per channel, and the THX Ultra 2 Plus certification means it ticks all the boxes for larger home cinema rooms (up to 85 cubic metres with a viewing distance of around 3.5m).

There’s also an all-star line-up of video features, including IDT’s HQV Vida VHD1900 processor, 4K upscaling courtesy of Marvell’s QDEO technology (one for the future) and ISF calibration tools.

Onkyo TX-NR5010 – Online Audio

But a major attraction for many buyers will be the unit’s plentiful network functionality. First up is a range of music streaming and internet radio services, including Spotify, vTuner, Simfy, Last.fm, AUPEO! and MP3tunes (you’ll need a premium account for Spotify). What’s more the unit’s DLNA support means you can stream your own music from media servers, and with a list of supported formats that should keep music lovers very happy indeed – MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless, FLAC and WMA Lossless.

Like most AV receivers, the unit doesn’t feature Wi-Fi out of the box but if you want to avoid Ethernet then Onkyo sells a wireless LAN adapter (UWF-1) for around £40. An optional Bluetooth adapter (UBT-1) provides an even easier way of listening to your tunes from mobile devices.

Onkyo’s advanced 32-bit DSP chip also conjures up the usual cavalcade of sound modes, including four settings for gaming (Rock, Sports, Action and RPG), Theater-Dimensional, several THX presets and music modes like Orchestra, Unplugged and All Channel Stereo.

The NR5010 also comes equipped with seven TI Burr Brown 192kHz/32-bit DACs, Vector Linear Shaping Circuitry (VLSC), Phase-Locked Loop jitter-cleaning circuit technology and gold-plated speaker posts and input jacks.

Onkyo TX-NR5010 – DTS Neo:X

Finally this wouldn’t be a Onkyo amp without a couple of world firsts – it’s the first to offer DTS Neo:X 11-channel upmixing support from the 11.4 pre-outs, as well as being one of the first consumer electronics products to incorporate Cisco Linksys’ SimpleTap router connection technology, which simplifies how it connects to a network.