HEOS

This app has lost the WiFi connection to my soundbar multiple times requiring a full initial setup to get back going. When listening to music from my phone as a source it constantly bugs out where multiple restarts of the app are required just to play music. I was told when I bought the denon soundbar that denon was a sound company first and app company second. I didn’t realize how distant of a second place to at meant. Gotta do better if this is the only interface to the speakers.

My home audio / TV setup runs through a direct Ethernet wired Denon 550 Soundbar, which in turn connects to a wired Denon subwoofer, and two wireless Denon 150 speakers. Home Internet is both strong (with a router located within 0-15 feet of all devices) and very fast. When everything is working together, the sound is pretty great. The problem is that things work smoothly only about 85-90 percent of the time. HEOS is continually dropping the group connections between the soundbar and all other equipment. Sometimes all I have to do is tweak the sound settings (toggling between Stereo and Multi-channel Stereo) for it to remember to send sound to the speakers, etc. Sometimes I have to reboot everything for it to work properly. And sometimes I literally have to ungroup all connections and recreate / reconnect the group all over again. These malfunctions bear no relation to the occasional power or Internet outage, either. Needless to say, it’s a major inconvenience when this occurs — and is really an overall software failure to run properly only 90 percent of the time (or less). The HEOS app is frequently updated — and with extremely annoying reminders that insist you update — yet the “updates” do absolutely nothing to improve actual HEOS performance or (very rarely) add new features. Instead, they mostly seem to be advertisements for new Denon products. Unfortunately, I have sunk a minor fortune into all this Denon equipment, and so am stuck with its HEOS app, too. But had I known that these pesky issues would occur so often, I would have probably gone with a Sonos system for wireless sound, etc.

Need to add You Tube Music as a source.

Someone nearby has the same app and is able to turn my receiver on and play music using the app. One time music started blaring and I was afraid the speakers would blow. I’m sure whoever was doing it was wondering why their music wasn’t playing! Add a password so not just anyone can access your receiver!

HEOS support for Amazon Alexa and Google Home is almost useless. It doesn’t work at all for Alexa. You can’t add a Heos device to an Alexa Speaker group for whole house music. You can only make a Heos speaker group of purely Heos devices. Another walled garden paying lip service to interoperability and marketing it with big “Works with” logos that are straight-up lies.

I’ve only had the app a couple of days and it is always stuck in signing into wifi and never does.

I use this occasionally to play songs from my iPhone. It would be more than occasionally if it weren’t so much work to get it to play songs, the user interface isn’t simple and the option I want is too far down the menu. It also has trouble finding my Denon unit with “unable to play …” displayed.

Barebones, music server keeps dropping.

I liked this app and used it for years. It was a 4/5 star app for me. Now I have to log in to use my equipment? What’s the deal? Need to pay to us with the next update? No thank you. I hope they eliminate the login with the next update. As for the App… it still works well. Sees my devices just fine. I can play music from my phone, off my server, and radio.

Heos UI is too complex, simple tasks require switching from one screen to another. It is not intuitive how this operates. “Improvements” have only added unnecessary complexity and have made the app annoying at best.