Denon Home 400 review: A serious soundstage to rival Sonos

The middle child in Denon’s brand-new trio of wireless speakers for 2026 has picked quite a fight – it’s going up against some acknowledged market-leading spatial audio speakers from some of the most credible brands.

So does the Denon Home 400 have what it takes to compete – or has it picked a flight it can’t win? I've been living with one for some weeks to put it through its paces and it's very impressive in many aspects.

Price & Availability

The Denon Home 400 wireless Dolby Atmos speaker is on sale now and in the United Kingdom it costs £449. In the United States the going rate is $599.

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Need I say with undue emphasis that this area of the market already has quite a number of compelling offers from brands regarded as experts? The Sonos Era 300, for example, is an established and obvious alternative that Denon wants to take on.

Features & What's New?

Denon has arranged the Home 400 in a 2.0.2-channel layout, and has deployed speaker drivers that actually fire upwards (bolstered by some digital sound processing, naturally) in order to generate the sonic height that’s basically the whole point of Dolby Atmos spatial audio.

There are a couple of forward-facing 114mm aramid-reinforced paper mid/bass drivers occupying a lot of the face of the speaker behind that acoustic cloth. Above them are a pair of 19mm soft dome tweeters orientated in the same direction, and towards the middle of the cabinet there are two 25mm aluminum diaphragm mid/high drivers angled upwards to fire through the perforated top plate of the speaker.

Each of those drivers has its own block of Class D amplification, and the whole array is driven by a total of 90 watts. It’s an arrangement that can supposedly deliver a frequency response of 44Hz to 20kHz.

Getting audio information on board the Home 400 can be done in a number of different ways. There’s Bluetooth connectivity, naturally – although the 5.2 version the Denon is running is currently only compatible with the completely bog-standard SBC codec. An upgrade to Bluetooth LE is under consideration – it’s hoped this upgrade will bring a wider variety of codec compatibility, too.

A far better bet for wireless connectivity is the integrated dual-band Wi-Fi. As well as giving the Heos control app access to internet radio and the ability to integrate some of the more credible music streaming services, it allows the Home 400 to be Roon Ready, to operate with Apple AirPlay 2, and to access to ‘Connect’ versions of Qobuz, Spotify and Tidal.

On the rear of the cabinet there are a couple of physical inputs – a 3.5mm analogue socket and a USB-C slot that's for use with certain properly formatted flash drives. They’re both near the ‘mic on/off’ switch, the ‘Connect’ button that helps get the speaker onto a local network, the ‘Bluetooth pairing’ button, and the figure-of-eight socket for mains power.

Performance

No one buys a Dolby Atmos speaker without having a fairly strong interest in spatial audio – and it seems likely the effect that’s available via the Home 400 will win more than a few fans. Or, at least, it will if the speaker is given some sympathetic content to deal with.

Before I get to that, though, it’s worth discussing what the Denon is good at in every circumstance, because there’s a fair bit. For instance, it generates deep, varied and very well-behaved low-frequency activity – bass hits hard and with decent solidity, but it’s quite carefully shaped, very pleasantly detailed and well-controlled, so the speaker has no problem where rhythmic expression is concerned.

Frequency response, from bottom to top, is nicely even and smooth, and with the exception of the highest frequencies – which can sound a little bright and insubstantial – the tonality is even and consistent too.

The midrange projects with determination, and the same levels of detail evident at the bottom of the frequency range are apparent here too – there’s a stack of tonal and textural information handed over that makes for what sounds very much like a complete picture where voices are concerned.

There’s plenty of detail at the top end too, but the slight flimsiness in the way treble sounds are portrayed can, on occasion, make it sound almost edgy and means voices sometimes hit sibilants harder than is ideal.

Integration between all of the drive units is smooth, and when it’s playing stereo content in ‘pure’ mode, the Home 400 sounds nicely unified and quite direct – there’s a positivity to the way it presents music in this state that makes for a tangible sense of ‘performance’. Dynamic headroom is respectable, though nothing remarkable – changes in volume or intensity in a recording are identified and contextualised, though other designs can put greater distance between the quietest and the most full-on passages in a tune.

Switch to some Dolby Atmos content and the soundstage unarguably expands in all directions. There’s appreciable width and height to the presentation, but it’s not at the expense of cohesion or singularity – the Denon just manages to escape the confines of its cabinet more effectively than before.

Atmos doesn't shift the speaker's attitude where frequency response or tonality is concerned, and it doesn’t give anything away in terms of detail – in fact, given the right stuff to deal with, it can reveal even more of the more minor, more transient details than it can when playing the stereo equivalent. It’s one of the more effective and immersive Dolby Atmos speakers around when heard this way.

If you decide to get involved with the way the Denon sounds, though, by engaging ‘auto’ mode and sticking your oar into the adjustments available there, things can go one of two ways. The ‘-5 / +5’ scope of the ‘bass’ and ‘treble’ sliders are predictable in their effect, and so you’ll dial in the amount you prefer. The effect of the same ‘-5 / +5’ sliders for ‘width’ and ‘height’, though, is very much on a case-by-case basis and not always even remotely beneficial.

For instance, choose a couple of albums recorded long before Dolby Atmos became a thing, which have been remixed to take ‘advantage’ of spatial audio technology. Stream them via Tidal from the Heos app, and the effect of the ‘width’ and ‘height’ adjustment can be profoundly different.

Open up one album to its most spatial and it sounds wide and tall, the Home 400 actually getting close to creating a dome of sound that’s very gratifying indeed. Do the same with the other, though, and while it gets bigger it becomes hazy and vague, cannot place instruments with any kind of certainty, and its tonality fluctuates even as the music is in progress.

Dialling the ‘height’ and ‘width’ effects back below ‘zero’ not only shrinks the soundstage, it also fundamentally alters the tonality – high frequencies become inhibited, the midrange turns in on itself. It’s all very peculiar.

Design & Usability

At 219 x 300 x 150mm (HxWxD) the Denon Home 400 is a little larger than the Sonos Era 300 it quite obviously has in its sights – but it’s a more regular shape, and nothing like as odd in its appearance. Which can only be a sensible thing, even if the choice of finishes (‘stone’ or ‘charcoal’, which in practice means ‘grey’ or ‘greyer still’) is far from radical.

The standard of build and finish is extremely good, and the way the cabinet tapers just slightly down towards the pliant foot the speaker stands on (which includes some LED tell-tale lighting) almost qualifies as a design flourish.

Operating the Home 400 is no kind of hardship – although, as I will discuss shortly, the Heos app could be more cooperative. Voice control is available via Siri, for those who are Apple users. The speaker proves responsive and fairly swift to act if it’s used this way.

There are some physical controls arranged down one side of the cabinet – and they’re proper ‘push’ buttons (admittedly with very little travel) rather than ‘touch’ alternatives. They handle volume up/down, play/pause and will wake the voice assistant. There are also three ‘shortcut’ buttons to take you to predetermined radio stations, streaming services or whatever you fancy – they can be assigned in the Heos control app.

In many ways, the Heos app is ideal. It allows integration of plenty of music streaming services, is a portal to internet radio via TuneIn, and gives access to all the many multi-room, multi-channel and stereo pairing possibilities that are open to anyone who owns more than one Heos device.

There’s also some EQ adjustment available in the form of either ‘pure’ or ‘auto’ playback modes – the former defeats all processing for as faithful a description of the original content as possible, while the latter allows you to adjust the bass, treble, ‘width’ and ‘height’ of the sound, as previously described. It also allows you to create playlists, check on available updates, define the function of those ‘shortcut’ buttons, and plenty more.

It’s not the best-realised app around, though. It can forget what it’s doing, it’s not above crashing, and it can take its sweet time when it comes to responding to your requests. There are a few better user interfaces out there, and several of them operate products the Home 400 is in direct competition with.

Denon Home 400 review: Verdict

At its best, the Denon Home 400 is one of the most effective Dolby Atmos speakers available at anything like this money – it’s capable of sound far larger, in every direction, than its cabinet dimensions would suggest.

It’s possible to skew all its good work with injudicious use of its EQ and height/width settings, though, and the Heos control app has a distance to go before it bears comparison with the best of its rivals.

Also Consider

The most obvious alternative to the Denon Home 400 is the Sonos Era 300 – it’s arguably the company’s best pound-for-pound speaker. Its sound is big and confident, its spatial audio effect is convincing, and it has plenty of wider functionality options. It doesn’t support Dolby Atmos via Tidal currently, though.

If you’d rather a speaker that looks thrillingly retro, you can always consider the JBL Authentics 500. It’s got a charming aesthetic, it serves up hefty, well-organised and large-scale sound, and it has Alexa and Google voice assistants built in. It can get rather stressed at the highest volumes, though, and its spatial audio effect is not as pronounced as that of the Denon or the Sonos options.