The app
The Denon Home range uses the HEOS app for streaming and multiroom, and given that HEOS also appears in an extensive range of products from Denon and Marantz, these three speakers can become part of a multiroom system far beyond this Denon Home range. The HEOS app is comprehensive and marvellously simple to use; in its earliest days we recall calling it perhaps oversimplified, but given the complexities and changes some rivals have since made, we happily withdraw that remark — the HEOS system with its three bottom navigation options gets you everywhere fast, while rapid access to the ‘Now playing’ screen makes transport and volume control easy, even in a multiroom context. The only time you need to button mash is when you’re deep in a source’s menus — whether browsing Tidal or into the folder structure of a NAS drive, when to return to the main source menu you need to back up through all those layers.
It’s properly localised, too, showing Spotify Connect, Tidal, Deezer, iHeartRadio, TuneIn and Soundcloud as its default services. Stickers on the Home products note also Amazon Music HD, but that’s not yet available to Australia.
Below these services you can select ‘This iPhone’ (or whatever your device is), Music Servers, Playlists (made within the HEOS app; you can also queue music from different sources), History (very useful), and then physical inputs. In the case of the Home units these are USB and the analogue input. With these inputs, the Denon Home range delivers an understated but potentially huge advantage over many competitors — they can broadcast these inputs to other Denon Home speakers. When using the Home 250, say, the HEOS app shows not only its own inputs but those of the Homes 150 and 350 on the same network. So you could, for example, have a hard drive of music files attached to one unit and access them from all. A turntable attached (via a phono stage) to an input anywhere in the home can broadcast to a different speaker or all of them. This advantage of input forwarding can deliver much more music around the home.
Joining rooms for multiroom playback is simple — in the ‘Rooms’ page of the app you just drag device names together to form a group. You can rename a group, and when playing music you can access either a group volume control or individual sliders for each device. The effect of these sliders was immediate and accurate; some systems either lag badly or are plain old hard to control.
We find the HEOS app enjoyable and easy to use, especially as it doesn’t have the habit of some others in losing sight of the target device and having to reconnect each time you open the app. So although there’s no physical remote available or possible here, you miss it less than on those other systems.