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Folks at Denon have been making audio components since 1910. Yes, that's 116 years, so this is not their first rodeo. They made their first disc recorder in 1939, their first tape recorder in 1951, and in 1970 they introduced a direct-drive turntable for the recording studio and radio station market.

Today, Denon introduces three portable smart speakers. They have really good sound quality, so we're digging 'em. Let's dive in. These three are the Denon Home 200 at $399, the Denon Home 400 at $599, and the Home 600 at $799. We'll focus on the middle of the three, the Home 400, and discuss it in detail, then we'll compare it against the Denon Home 250, which is out on the market now,

And then we'll compare it against the more compact and affordable Home 200 and the bigger and more powerful 600. So the first thing that we noticed with these three products is that they look pretty cool. You can see that Denon's actually done a really nice job with the way they've done the curves here to make it look stylish. And looks do count. Once you put this thing in your living room or your kitchen countertop or the credenza in your bedroom or whatever it is, it's probably gonna be there for a long time because it's well-built.

You want it to look good and complement the look of the other things that are in your home that you're proud of. So, you can get Denon Home 400 up and running really in a matter of minutes. It connects easily to your Wi-Fi network. Maybe more importantly, the Denon HEOS app has been out for quite a long time now, and Denon and Marantz have put a ton of work into evolving the app, so it's actually a very stable platform at this point in time, and that's really important because these devices not only are judged on their looks and their sound and how easy they are to use and all that sort of thing, but the app itself has to be easy, and we'll talk more about the HEOS app in just a little bit.

So before we go any further, let's talk sound quality. For the size and price of these things, they sound really good. The first song that we used is an old song from The Guess Who called "These Eyes." I love Burton Cummings' voice, and the musicians are really good. The thing that jumped out at me right away was that it didn't sound like a small, compact little portable.

The sound stage was really pretty big, and it took me back a little bit. I wasn't expecting how big the sound stage would be from one box. The next thing we played was a classical piece, Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies" from The Nutcracker Suite, which has always been one of my favorite pieces of music. That song in particular has plenty of low-frequency stuff with the basses and cellos, those massed strings that sounded so good and rich and full, but there's plenty of woodwind instruments too: the piccolos and clarinets and flutes, that just made me realize how cohesive this little box could sound when played, really, at fairly loud volume. I was really impressed.

We then played Al Jarreau's "Wait a Little While," a song I've used many times for demoing speakers, and his voice was solidly centered, but the keyboard parts and the cymbals, again, seemed to be coming from way beyond the boundaries of this little box, and I was thinking to myself, "Maybe I should just get one of these things." It was that good.

One of the biggest differentiators between Denon Home 200, 400, 600, and previous products, is Dolby Atmos music playback, and if you haven't heard Dolby Atmos music, you really need to experience it. So traditional stereo, you've got sounds coming from the left, from the right, and then some other sounds that are solidly centered, depending on how, of course, the producer mixed the music. Dolby Atmos music is a game-changer in terms of the spatiality of it. It's literally 360 degrees. You've got things coming at you in the height dimension, so above or below, and it can even be sort of in front or in back. So there's a spatiality that's really a huge leap forward from what we've always known in traditional stereo music.

There's a song, "Writers on the Storm" from The Doors, that I've listened to it feels like a million and one times. There's a new release of it in Dolby Atmos music, and that song starts with that sort of soft rain, and the bass part and drum come in with the keyboards. You can literally hear the rain coming down from up above you. It's really something impressive, and something that really sets apart this new series of products from Denon from what they've done before.

So the platforms offering Dolby Atmos music include Apple Music Spatial Audio, TIDAL, and Amazon Music HD, and we're sure that there will be more platforms in the future. Let's talk high-res streaming, which, of course, you get here. The reason why people love high-res streaming from Amazon Music or Qobuz or TIDAL so much is that you hear all kinds of detail that you just don't get when you're listening to more lossy formats. You also, of course, though, may have some high-res music on a USB stick or a NAS drive, and you can plug that in right here at the bottom, and enjoy lossless music that way. So we talked a little bit earlier about the easy-to-use HEOS app. Let's talk about some of the options it gives you. This unit has a realistic stereo image just on its own, as we said, but if you choose to, you can pair it with a second unit, Denon 400, so that they're both equal, and get a really solid stereo image.

And that’s not all. You can keep going. So you can actually wirelessly link literally up to 64 zones. Not all homes are gonna enable you to run wires to physical speakers all over the place. So with up to 64 zones, you can have all of them playing the same thing, but you can also group zones individually. So maybe you’re having a party in the basement, and you’ve got four of these products downstairs. You link them as a zone, but still, Billy and Susie each in their own bedrooms can be using theirs individually with their own music, not linked to the zone that you’ve got downstairs in a kind of a party mode. That’s one of the really nice things about Heos, is it gives you whole home flexibility wirelessly. Let’s talk about what the Denon engineers put under the hood to give you all this good sound. There’s a pair of 4 1/2-inch woofers that do a really good job giving you the solid bass.

There’s a pair of 1-inch tweeters as well to help give you the solid stereo imaging, but remember that this does Dolby Atmos music. They’ve got a pair of up-firing 1-inch drivers, and that’s where you can get this kind of amazingly immersive quality from a product that’s not all that physically big. Additionally, they’ve got an individual amp on each one of those six drive units, so you get a really kind of clean and detailed sound from it too.

So how does Denon Home 400 compare to the Denon 250 that we’ve been selling? Well, in many ways, it really doesn’t, even though they’re in somewhat similar price ranges. Because you’ve got these up-firing tweeters, there’s a sense of immersion even in stereo that’s really impressive, and obviously, they also enable the Dolby Atmos music that sounds so incredible. You don't have that in the 250. Also, you’ve got these twin 4 1/2-inch bass drivers that are really good, and in my mind, you get an upgrade in the bass sound quality versus the twin 4-inch woofers and a 5 1/4 bass radiator that you’ve got in the Home 250. So I think, you know, really this is kind of a leap forward versus the technology that was available to Denon when they made the 250.

One difference to the 250 that may or may not make any difference to you is it’s a little bit bigger. So really in all three dimensions, you know, width, height, and especially in the depth, it’s just a little bit deeper, too. May not make any difference to you. It’s also probably a good time to mention that you can get this in two finishes. This very nice-looking charcoal gray, but they also make what I would call a very light gray that they refer to as stone, and that looks pretty cool too.

Let’s talk about connectivity and control. So, you can connect with Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Obviously, that makes it easy for your friends to come over and listen to music without having to get on your Wi-Fi. You can also do AirPlay 2. You can, if you want to, control this with Siri or Alexa, but if you don’t want voice control, they were clever enough to put a little switch. Totally up to you whether you want voice control or not. You also have the Bluetooth pairing button here. You’ve got the USB connection that we referred to earlier.

They give you an aux input, which is great, because you can hook up legacy sources like a CD player or whatever. Also, your connect button on one side. And then on the side, you’ve got power on/off, volume up/down, and three preset buttons as well. It even supports a subwoofer powered by Heos. That can be a great addition, especially in a bigger room. So how does Denon Home 400 compare to its little brother, the Home 200, and to the larger and more powerful Home 600?

Well, let’s start with the pricing. At least at this point in time, it’s $399 for the Home 200, $599 for the Home 400, $799 for the Home 600. And obviously, for a lot of consumers, price is the big differentiator. There are not a ton of differences in terms of the features, but there will be a difference in terms of the sound quality, of course. The Denon Home 200 cannot generate the levels of bass that you can get from the 400, for example. Won’t play as loud. That’s gonna be no big deal to some people. In a larger room, it might be a big deal for you. Comparatively, of course, to the 600, you can’t get the same levels of bass you can out of the 600. You also won’t get quite that room-filling dimension, and again, that can become really important in a larger room setting. So that can be the determining factor for a lot of consumers.

But for a lot of consumers, the determining factor may be the size. I wouldn’t refer to this as huge, but when I’m holding it in my hand, it’s not really petite either. So some people are gonna pick the 200 not because of price or its room-filling ability or inability, but simply because it’s more compact. So it might be easier for you to hide it on a shelf, you know, put it right next to the, you know, whatever in your kitchen, that sort of thing.

And correspondingly, again, some folks won’t mind the size of the 600 at all. Some folks won’t want it because of its size. So that can become, for a lot of customers, the single biggest differentiator or the reason why they wanna choose one or the other, is the domesticity, if you will. The way it fits into the home environment. Personally, I think that the 400, with its cool curves and the fact that it’s not too terribly big, I think of this as a winner.

And honestly, I wouldn’t mind the 600 in my home either. It will fill the room more impressively with music. So you can see that you’ve really kinda got several keys in terms of which one is the one that you’re gonna wanna wind up taking home. So let’s sum up. Who are these three products for? Obviously, there are a ton of Bluetooth speaker options out there, and if what you really want is something you can put on your belt loop or something you can put on the bike, these three really are not the right product for you.

But I think that Denon has done a great job of giving you a family now of three different products at three different price points which have a ton of features in common, but as we talked about a moment ago, they really are also for three distinctly different customers based on what your individual preferences are. We can say that these three sound great. All three of them can really play pretty loudly and with pretty nice bass response as well. They play Dolby Atmos music, which I can’t say enough about. If you haven’t experienced it yet, you’ll want to, ‘cause it’s a game-changer versus stereo. For more information on these three products, all of Denon’s products, and all of our fine brands, you can go to gramophone.com, and you can shop Sky by Gramophone.

FAQ

What is the difference between Denon Home 200, 400, and 600? The main differences are size, output, and room coverage. The 200 is best for small spaces, the 400 works well in medium-sized rooms, and the 600 is designed for larger areas with more sound output.

Can Denon Home speakers be used in multiple rooms? Yes. Using the HEOS™ app, you can connect multiple speakers across different rooms and control them individually or as a group.

Do Denon Home speakers support Spotify and Apple Music? Yes. They support Spotify Connect and Apple AirPlay 2, allowing you to stream directly from your preferred apps.

Is the Denon Home series easy to set up? Very. Setup is done through the HEOS™ app and typically takes just a few minutes with minimal steps.

Can you pair two Denon Home speakers for stereo sound? Yes. You can pair two speakers of the same model to create a stereo setup for improved imaging and soundstage.

Is Denon HEOS™ better than Bluetooth speakers? HEOS™ offers more flexibility than standard Bluetooth. It allows for multi-room audio, higher-quality streaming over Wi-Fi, and integration with other Denon and Marantz products.