Fill your home with sound the easy way
Finally, a multi-room Wi-Fi hi-fi that’s so easy to use you’ll want to have a house party
When I switch on Denon’s HEOS system and it just works, without prodding, prayers or – God forbid – reaching for the manual, I practically fall to my knees and weep.
Multi-room sound systems are legendarily unco-operative beasts, often about as mysterious and hostile as your average gas boiler.
Over the past decade, building up a family of speakers connected by Wi-Fi has been about as wearying, messy and expensive as starting an actual, flesh-and-blood family. I know. I’ve tried both. But the real world appears to have suddenly caught up with geeks like me. Last year, multi-room audio systems became the most popular category of audio product, according to analysts GfK.
It’s thanks – in part – to Wi-Fi routers getting a bit better in terms of range, reliability and ability to deal with common obstacles such as walls.
But the units themselves have also become a bit easier to tame, offering apps that let you stream music from an iPad, say, to any room in the home. Sonos laid the groundwork with its excellent range of speakers – but Denon has added its own layer of polish.
Like the Sonos units, Denon’s HEOS 7 isn’t cheap. The big unit is €599, the satellite HEOS 5 is €399 and the small 3 model is €299 (hifihut.ie). But this is an area where you don’t want to cut corners.
Many early Wi-Fi hi-fis were made by computer companies with little pedigree in sound. The big HEOS 7 might look like a handbag but it’s a proper hi-fi, with five amplifiers under the bonnet. It can dutifuly murmur in the background as you serve canapés, or if you uncork too many bottles it can also rock out in splendid fashion.
The Denon app offers access to MP3s files on your device, or on hard drives elsewhere, plus streaming services such as Spotify and Deezer. There are so few hiccups you forget you are listening over Wi-Fi. Making the speakers in my office and living room play together is as simple as pinching the two rooms together in the iPad app. It almost makes you want to have another house party. You can even plug in a record player or CD deck in one room and listen to it anywhere in the home – and you also don’t need to heave out old hi-fis, as Denon offers streamer units that can plug either into the back of old systems, or into stray speakers.
Every piece of HEOS kit has the same range of sockets in the back and works the same way. Once one is connected, it’ll quietly tell any new arrivals what the score is. Denon even sells WiFi boosters for anyone unfortunate enough to have a home made of the wrong kind of stone. It isn’t quite idiot-proof, obviously – nothing is – but it’s certainly very idiot-resistant.