Early this year we had a look at several items in one of the newer multi-room systems, Heos by Denon. This system, with its underlying network technology developed in Australia, was firmly aimed at the consumer, with a nice range of compact speakers and some front ends for those who wanted to use their own speakers or sound systems.

Now comes the Heos Drive, quite a departure from those units, although based on the same underlying technology and, of course, perfectly capable of working with those other units.

What is it?

The Heos Drive is a multi-zone network audio player with eight channels of amplification. It supports four separate zones – that is, four playback zones and four input sources. Like the existing Heos products the Drive is controlled by means of an app installed on an Android or iOS device.

Indeed, you have to have the app because there are no controls (aside from power and a couple of setting switches) on the Drive itself. There isn’t even a volume knob.

Let’s be clear: the Heos Drive is principally an installation device. While it looks like a regular high component, and is sized as such, the low profile feet can be unscrewed and two rack ears – supplied with the unit – can be attached for rack mounting. On the front is a soft power switch and indicator lights, and that’s it. All the action is at the back, in the form of connections.

There are four analogue audio inputs and four USB sockets to which music storage can be attached. There are also two optical and two coaxial digital audio inputs. Any of these dozen inputs can be used to provide music to any of the four stereo outputs. The other main connection is Ethernet for network audio.

Actually, there are two Ethernet ports, but not for connecting to two networks. The second is for connecting an additional Heos device, such as another Heos Drive. The Heos system supports up to 32 devices. Each Heos Drive counts as four devices.

That’s input. What about output? The eight Class D amplifier channels are organised as four stereo amps, each capable of producing 60 high fidelity Watts. The idea is that speaker cables will wend their way to four different rooms so you can pipe music to each … music independently programmed for each. If 60W isn’t enough, you can bridge the outputs to provide up to four 120W channels.

Also there are line outputs for each of the four zones so you can run active speakers or feed the signal to other amps. The amp supports 4Ω speaker loads as well as higher ones in both bridged and normal mode, so a wide range of speaker support is assured.

Setting Up

When it comes to setting up, you may wonder what you do with a device that has no actual controls. I always worry at the moment of truth: will the control app find the device? What if it doesn’t? Is there a fall back, or some manual tweak?

The quick start manual gave clear instructions: plug everything into the Heos Drive, switch it on, install the Heos app to your Android/iOS device, start it up and the Heos Drive will appear within the ‘Rooms’ tab. But when I started it up, the app actually told me to plug a cable from my device’s earphone output into a connection on Heos unit. That’s what you do with one of the standalone Heos units.

But after a couple of seconds some relays clicked within the Heos Drive, and then it appeared within the app. And that was it. All set up and ready to go. The app worked with utter reliability on my Android tablet, my Android phone and my iPad Mini.

When I found the settings menu in the app, I touched the ‘Software Update’ option in the menu and found that an update was available. The app did not permit me to back out of the process so I sent it the task of updating straight away. The four Zone lights on the front panel flashed amber and then blue as things proceeded. It took about 11 minutes to complete on my 6Mbps internet connection.

When that was done and I examined the ‘About’ panel in the app and there was a surprise. It turns out that rather than this being a single network product, it is actually four! There was a separate IP address for each of the four Drives. Each had a separate MAC address (and, for some reason, a separate and different Wireless MAC as well, even though the product cannot connect wirelessly).

All other setup is simply plugging in as many source devices as you want.

Performance

At first, control seemed a bit clunky. I was constantly darting between the ‘Room’, ‘Music’ and ‘Now Playing’ tabs of the app.

You need to spend most time in ‘Now Playing’, not just because it looks pretty but because that’s where the volume control is. So if you want to lower the volume in a different room, you go ‘Room’, touch the room that now want to control, go ‘Now Playing’ and then slide the volume slider.

But the cool thing is that the unit supports multiple control devices. I had my phone and two tablets all running the app at the same time. If I turned up the volume with one, the Heos Drive would communicate it back to the other control apps and their volume sliders would increase to reflect the change.

So you can easily have several tablets scattered around the house for convenient operation in each locale.

Also, in addition to all the sources mentioned earlier, you can make available the contents of your tablet or phone via the app to the whole system. This doesn’t just mean that you can use your phone to send its songs to a particular room. It means that I can access the music on your phone using the app on my phone to play in my room. Don’t worry, it’s up to you to enable this on your phone in the app settings.

As you may have gathered, the playback zones are termed ‘Rooms’. You can rename each room to one of many options, or type in your own if it suits you. You can group rooms as well, just by dragging one onto another within the app. Grouped rooms have separate volume sliders grouped under a master one so you can adjust them independently or together as suits.

Again I stress that all this worked exactly as it was supposed to, smoothly and effectively. If I wanted to find something to complain about, I’d say that I would have like the ability to drag the time-elapsed indictor to a different point in the song.

So what network audio is available? Well, any DLNA music served up on your network for one thing (including from those other phones and tablets in which this has been enabled, as mentioned). Then there are a bunch of online services: Pandora, Spotify, TuneIn, Deezer, Soundcloud, Tidal and Rdio. I’ve got a Spotify subscription so that was the one I went with. Spotify was, as is usually the case with Spotify, only accessible via its own app, so while the Spotify Connect feature worked flawlessly, if you’re only using one device you’re going to have to switch between the two apps, one for song selection, the other for volume control.

Now there are limitations. The maximum resolution of audio handled from network sources was 16 bits, 48kHz. Anything higher scored an error message. So this is not your high resolution music player of choice. You can feed audio up to 192kHz, 24 bits into one of the digital audio inputs, but it must be downsampled by the unit before being sent around the place.

I used a variety if loudspeakers with the unit, from indifferent to my current favourites, a pair of KEF LS50 stereo speakers. The transparency of the latter showed that – aside from the resolution limitations mentioned – the audio electronics within the Heos Drive was beautifully transparent, providing extremely high quality sound.

I had a little play around with a different music player app on my Android tablet. It turns out that the Drive operates as a DLNA renderer – that presumably is how the Heos app treats it. It added two items for each of its four rooms to the list of available renderers. Once I chose one (it was two rooms grouped together) the music being played appeared on an iPad that was running the Heos app, allowing the levels to be controlled. These apps really are delightful the way they effectively become extensions of the Heos Drive.

There are a couple of fans inside the left hand side to provide for cooling. They came on occasionally during the test period, and even though the unit was sitting on my desk right beside me, the low level of noise was barely noticeable.

Conclusion

A networked multi-room sound system lives and dies not just by the quality of the equipment, but by the effectiveness of its control apps. The Heos Drive scores extremely well on both fronts, apart only from the lack of high resolution audio support.