Denon Home

‘Denon Home’ kinda replaces the existing HEOS range of speakers — yet the HEOS technology is still at the heart of the new threestrong wireless multiroom family.

Denon Home 150 Denon Home 250 Denon Home 350

Last issue we reviewed the largest of this new three-strong range of wireless multiroom speakers from Denon, and as noted then, they mark a significant change. Many readers will know the ‘HEOS by Denon’ range of wireless speakers and components that was launched in 2014, with HEOS evolving to become its own brand. That’s now more or less over, with HEOS now marketed as a streaming platform, a technology which now appears in many Denon and Marantz products, with efforts to spread it further. The HEOS-branded wireless speakers are on the way out, replaced by Denon Home speakers, while the HEOS soundbars and subwoofer have been slightly revised and rebranded back to Denon. Only the components — the HEOS Link and Amp and some more custom-orientated units — retain the HEOS branding; elsewhere HEOS becomes just another technology sticker on the box, though the platform remains as vital to their operation as ever.

Mind you, in a multiroom context this rebranding exercise is irrelevant to the consumer, since the HEOS platform makes them all work with each other. We explore what that means at the end of this article.

Meet the family

The new three-strong wireless speaker includes, in rising order, the Home 150, Home 250 and Home 350. Gone are the quirkily angular HEOS speaker designs; these are more straightforward boxes, each one a rectangular box with curved edges and a sturdy fabric wrap in a choice of black or white, though more accurately actually a light grey with white trimmings or a dark charcoal grey with black trimmings. The smallest Home 150 is mono, with

two drivers in a vertical 38cm-high case. The Home 250 is stereo with four active drivers and a passive bass radiator in a cabinet 30cm wide and a surprising 21.5cm high. The Home 350 is the largest, a substantial unit 38cm wide, 23cm high and 18cm deep.

They are all HEOS-equipped, so that platform delivers full streaming access to online music services, network streaming from music shares up to high-res audio quality, and the ability to function in a multiroom system with other HEOSequipped products.

The inclusion of AirPlay 2 means that they can do so also in an Apple home with other AirPlay 2 products, under Siri control, while the Home units are also addressable from Google Voice Assistant and Amazon Alexa devices — it’s good to see voice control being universally covered in this way, rather than sitting in one camp or another.

All three Denon Home speakers have the same connectivity — dual-band Wi-Fi, but also a physical Ethernet socket if preferred, plus a USB-A slot for playing files from a stick or hard drive, and a minijack analogue input. While you wouldn’t expect an optical digital input on the smallest Home 150, it might be considered an omission on the Home 350. Another limited spec is Bluetooth, which mentions no codecs at all, so is likely limited to the base SBC, lacking even AAC to raise the quality from Apple devices, nor aptX for Android device users. But Apple users have AirPlay 2, and HEOS can play music on your device via the network anyway, so this will only affect the use of apps and services other than those directly accessible from within the HEOS app.

Set-up of each device requires plugging it in, then connecting to it from the HEOS app. Adding the Home 350 was a breeze, taking all of about a minute — Add Device, identify the speaker, press the Connect button on the back, and that was it. Not even a firmware update to sit through.

Not so the Home 150 and 250, which each had connection issues, the app failing to find either of them repeatedly from either an iPhone or an iPad Pro, so that we had to turn to the suggested alternatives, which involve either WPS button-press connection to your router, or giving the Home 150 an Ethernet connection via the supplied cable. We had an Ethernet cable to hand, and once the Home 150 was networked it appeared in the app and could then be connected easily to the Wi-Fi. So while it’s frustrating when connections fail, the app walked us through alternate connection methods clearly and successfully.

The final connection method listed in the app is the one used by HEOS speakers, which involves connecting a minijack cable between the HEOS speaker and your device — but this isn’t available for the Home series, perhaps because ever fewer smart devices these days have headphone minijack sockets available for this method of connection.

We were interested to note that Mozilla (maker of the Firefox browser) is also somewhere inside, judging from an extraordinary eight pages of small print in the manual covering the rules of having its source code onboard the Home range.

So that’s the commonalities — let’s now check out the Home units one by one...

Also compatible with...

Thanks to their inclusion of the HEOS platform the Denon Home range can group and communicate natively with a long list of Denon and Marantz products which carry the platform. These range from the massive market-leading multichannel AV receivers made by both companies down through high-quality stereo amplifiers and on to neat little smart amps like the Marantz M-CR612 which we had under review last issue, and which was still in residence when these Home units arrived. And, of course, any of the original HEOS range, which includes the HEOS Amp and the streaming add-on, the HEOS Link.

We’ve also seen (see Home 150 review) how Denon has rejigged two of its soundbars: the DHT-S716H (formerly the HEOS Bar) and the DHT-S516H (formerly the HEOS HS2, as well as the wireless active DSW-1H subwoofer, formerly the HEOS SUB. You can pair a couple of Home 150s to one of these soundbars (or a soundbar and subwoofer) to enjoy a 5.1-channel surround package on special movie nights, while you can resituate the Home 150s the rest of the time as speakers in other rooms.

But there’s more, thanks to the inclusion of AirPlay 2, which allows Mac or Apple device owners to address the Denon Homes via that connection, which allows grouping with any other AirPlay-compatible speakers, as well as providing an endpoint for those who invest in Roon software.

And if you’re keen to use voice control, Denon’s Home speakers are able to be addressed via all three main methods — Google Assistant, Alexa and, via AirPlay 2, Siri. Alexa takes the most setting up, but they all worked well enough within their abilities.

Conclusions

With these three strong, musical and versatile smart speakers, together with a heap of existing HEOS family members, Denon’s Home series looks to be a true contender for your multiroom dollar if the cabinet design and pricing appeals.