The Denon Home 600 has all the makings of one of the best smart speakers. Sound is the most important thing, right? You’ll be pleased to know that the Home 600 sounds fantastic. There’s enviable balance across the entire frequency range, rich bass, and energetic mids.
So why only a 3.5-star rating? Why not 5? Two reasons: one, the price. $799 is a lot to spend on a home speaker that doesn’t even have its own built-in smart assistant. Two, the companion app: HEOS works, but it has major issues. While not as speaker-breaking as Sonos’ headline-making app problems last year, HEOS just feels like it was designed to be frustrating. And when you’re spending $800 on a speaker, there’s simply no room for these rookie errors.
But if you want a seriously good home speaker that will have your guests going “Ooh” and “Aah”, then you’ll definitely want to learn more. To find out, keep reading this Denon Home 600 review.
Denon Home 600 review: Specs
Denon Home 600 review: Price & availability
There’s no way around it: the Denon Home 600 is very, very, very expensive. It’s a whopping $799 from Amazon U.S. and £599 from Amazon U.K. This is considerably pricier than any competition — the Bose Lifestyle Ultra ($299, although more comparable to Denon’s $399 Home 200 in size), the Apple HomePod 2 ($299), Google Audio Home Speaker ($119), and even its smaller sibling, the Denon Home 400 ($599). Even Sonos’s Era 300 is $499 — yes, $300 cheaper than the Denon Home 600.
There’s not really anything in the Home 600’s ballpark. It’s bigger, heavier, and more expensive than any other home speaker I’ve come across. This is a speaker. No, this is a Speaker. Capital letters required here.
Denon Home 600 review: Design
Just like the Denon Home 400, the Home 600 is beautiful. It’s huge, at almost 18 inches wide and 9 inches deep. Obviously, I don’t know the layout of your home, but this speaker didn’t fit anywhere in my apartment. The Home 400 looks beautiful on my mantlepiece, but the 600 was too deep to fit here. I had to put it on the coffee table. For this reason, I wouldn’t recommend it for small homes.
If you’ve got the space, though, it’ll look gorgeous in your place. The speaker comes in charcoal or stone — obviously, I tested stone. The mesh cover is pleasing to the eye, and the buttons are tactile and accessible. I especially like the brushed metal casing and the tactile plastic on the front speaker; features like this just make it feel more elevated and elegant than Bose, Sonos, and Apple’s equivalents.
Another thing that makes the Home 600 feel elevated? The 5.1 speaker configuration. Yes, the Home 600 has five speakers and a built-in subwoofer, all with individual pre-amps. In real terms, this means the speakers aren’t fighting for power, and the speaker itself has an impressive 170W of audio power.
Connectivity
Apart from the gargantuan size, what sets the Denon Home 600 apart from other smart speakers is the range of connectivity options. Rather than just being a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth speaker — which it can do — it also has hi-res USB-C playback and a 3.5mm input.
As this is a home speaker, I listened via the HEOS app and Spotify Connect.
Smart home features
As with the Denon Home 400, the Home 600 isn’t actually a “smart speaker” in the traditional sense… in that it can’t actually function as a smart speaker. If you have a HomePod, you can add the Denon Home collection to your Apple Home, but the speakers don’t have a native smart assistant. Consequently, you cannot use them as you might expect — no “Alexa, set a timer for 10 minutes” or “Hey Google, put a note in my calendar”. The speakers simply do not function like this.
As I don’t have a HomePod, the Denon Home 600 was effectively just a home speaker with AirPlay and Bluetooth (and USB-C playback). Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great speaker, but this is a pretty major con if you’re looking specifically for a smart speaker. You’d be better off with the Google Nest, Bose, a Sonos, or Apple HomePod 2.
Denon Home 600 review: Sound quality
As with the Denon Home 400, the 600 sounds great. It has a range of connectivity options, as discussed above, which will impress audiophiles more than, say, the Bose Lifestyle Speaker. Due to its positioning as a smart/wireless speaker, I tested via Qobuz, our best music streaming service for audiophiles, built into HEOS.
Before listening, the HEOS app will prompt you to calibrate your sound based on the room. You don’t have to do anything other than tell the app how close the speaker is to a wall.
First, I played Call Me by Blondie. The ravenous guitars were powerful and rich through the Home 600, and the vocals were clear and expansive. Every layer of the track was nicely balanced, and I could even hear the synths skating across the guitars. Blondie sounded great here.
Jesus of Suburbia by Green Day is a little heavier, with louder guitars, more overwhelming bass, and more raucous percussion. The Home 600 did struggle a little separating the vocals here — Billy Joe Armstrong’s own guitar drowned him out, so I had to turn down the bass. This helped poor Billy Joe to be heard over the instrumental, but the vocals were still a little quiet.
I listened to a few more rock songs from a similar era — Foo Fighters, Nirvana, and Muse — and it was just the Green Day track that suffered from suppressed vocals.
Last, I played Tambourine by The Dare, an electronic track with wobbly synth notes and processed vocals. This song sounded fantastic, with powerful, punchy bass and trickling synth notes clear in the top end of the track. It was super wide, clean, and overall just a fantastic performance.
The Denon Home 600 sounds fantastic. It has a wide, high soundscape with delicate handling of soft, high-frequency sounds. The low-end is controlled, but can be insistent and powerful with the bass upped to max. Although I wish the treble was a little less sharp in some genres — rock particularly — this didn’t upset me that much.
Oh, and when I grouped the Home 400 and 600? Magic. I just wish the speaker wasn’t held back by HEOS usability issues… which I’ll get into now.
Denon Home 600 review: App
If you’re familiar with Denon/Marantz products, you’ll likely also be familiar with HEOS. I’m in a love/hate relationship with HEOS. On the one hand, its new design is visually appealing.
On the other hand, it can be just ever-so-slightly frustrating. As I now have the Denon Home 400 and Denon Home 600, I can group my speakers to play the same music or ungroup them to play different songs. Well, kind of. You can group the speakers easily, but if you want to switch the master speaker, you can’t. You have to manually play the same playlist from the secondary speaker and manually turn off the master speaker, and then regroup. Yep, annoying.
However, if you want to stream through both speakers via Spotify, you have to do this from Spotify itself rather than HEOS. Confused? Yeah, me too. Here’s a screenshot so you can see what I mean.
HEOS is a quirky app. For example, you need to go into the ‘Rooms’ tab and activate your desired speaker before searching for music; otherwise, it will play using the last active speaker. You can’t click on the name at the bottom and select from your connected speakers. Again — confused? Me, too.
You also can’t use the built-in streaming services as normal in HEOS. For example, you can’t click on an artist name to view the artist page. You can either choose from Qobuz’s playlists or search for your own. If you want to peruse your own playlists, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the Qobuz widget. On top of this, after a song finishes, HEOS doesn’t play the rest of the playlist. It autoplays from previously played tracks. You have to click ‘Play all’ or ‘Shuffle’. It’s just little things like this that make HEOS a touch non-user-friendly.
So while HEOS is quirky, it just depends on whether you have the will and patience to learn. At $800, though, a companion app shouldn’t be quirky. It should just work. But this unfortunately seems par for the course. Remember the Sonos app drama last year? What is it with audio brands releasing fantastic speakers with unfortunate app issues?
Denon Home 600 review: Verdict
The Denon Home 600 is an incredible speaker. Sorry, Speaker (if you remember the lame joke I made at the start of this review). It sounds gorgeous, with lively bass and subtle detail in the high-end. With two Denon Homes, the grouped room playback is awesome.
However, this speaker has a 3.5-star rating for a reason, and that reason is HEOS-shaped. I want to give this speaker 4 stars, because its sound and design deserve it. But HEOS is a relentless beast intent on making me want to pull my hair out. There are quality-of-life issues that require fixing before I can wholeheartedly recommend the Denon Home 600. The Home 400 was cheaper, so these issues were easier to overlook. But $800? Nah. It’s gotta be perfect if you’re asking for almost a grand.
If you can look past app issues, then you won’t be disappointed by the Home 600. It sounds beautiful, looks beautiful, and comes so close. Just ignore HEOS, play direct from your streaming app, and it could be a 4.5-star product.