A couple of years ago Denon grabbed the consumer audio market's attention when it entered the burgeoning whole-house audio market through the release of its HEOS by Denon line of wireless products.
Approximately two years after the product line first launched Denon has announced that it has updated HEOS by Denon, and the popular manufacturer says headlining the line's update is the inclusion of Bluetooth wireless connectivity. In addition, the other major revision made to the product line is high-resolution audio compatibility up to 24-bit/192kHz via network connections or USB.
“We are pleased to introduce the is new upgrade to our HEOS platform that brings high-resolution audio playback, built-in Bluetooth, and a signficant increase in processing power that will intensify performance and support new features that we can't wait to bring to the HEOS family,” says Brendon Stead, senior vice president, product development, Denon. “Consumers are embracing our HEOS line of products, and we are looking forward to making the platform even better with new software features.”
Denon states that users can listen to uncompressed WAV (PCM), Apple Lossless (ALAC) and FLAC files, and soon there will be an update to enable the playback of DSD files (the codec employed by the SACD format) and AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format).
From a hardware perspective the new HEOS by Denon products employ ARM A9 1.25GHz processors with 512MB of flash memory and 256MB of RAM.
The company points out the HEOS app provides users of iOS, Android and Fire devices control of music that is stored on their network, and the app provides access to streaming services such as Pandora, Spotify, Rhapsody, TuneIn, iHeart Radio, SiriusXM, SoundCloud and Amazon Music.
Denon adds that Series 1 components are compatible with the new Series 2 product line to enable dealers to build upon original system installations, and Series 2 products will be identifed on their UPC label packaging as HS2 along with the model numbers, which will carry over from Series 1 (HEOS 1 HS2 for example).
The new HEOS line includes:
- HEOS 1 ($199)
- HEOS 3 ($299)
- HEOS 5 ($399)
- HEOS 7 ($599)
- HEOS Link ($349)
- HEOS Amp ($500)
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