When it comes to home audio, Sonos has led the way with its wireless, multi-speaker connectivity that just works.
Or at least it did until Sonos revamped its app and caused a whole mountain of trouble for itself. It’s led to the competition catching up and in some cases surpassing Sonos with their wireless speakers.
Denon is one of those brands looking to take advantage with the release of its Home 2.0 series. Made up of the Home 200, Home 400 and Home 600; they look to take the fight to Sonos with their own wireless, multi-speaker connectivity options and support for immersive sound.
We’ve compared the entry-level wireless speakers of the two brands in the Denon Home 200 and Sonos Era 100. How similar are they and what do they do differently from one another? We’ll go through the main differences below.
The Denon Home 200 supports virtual Dolby Atmos
The Sonos Era 100 is considered a stereo speaker. If you ask us, though, it can’t perform stereo sound as good as what you’d get from a stereo pairing, and doesn’t offer any virtualised processing to try and create that effect either.
The Denon Home 200 is also conceived off a ‘stereo’ speaker, but it supports a virtualised form of Dolby Atmos processing to create a bigger, taller and wider sound. You can adjust the size of the sound in the settings of the HEOS app.
The Sonos Era 100 is less expensive
The addition of Dolby Atmos to the Home 200 seems to have inflated the price. Its predecessor, the Home 150 cost £219 when it first launched back in 2019, which in turn, was less than what the Era 100 launched at in 2023, which was £249.
The Era 100 has since dropped in price, permanently, to £199. Compared to the Home 200, it’s £100 less expensive. That’s quite a chasm in terms of price.
You can switch smart assistants off
Both these wireless speakers are smart in the sense that they offer voice assistance.
Sonos supports its own Voice Control as well as Amazon Alexa. Denon works with Siri.
And with both, you can at the flick of a switch turn the microphones in the speakers off, so you don’t have voice assistants snooping around, listening to every word you might be saying in their vicinity.
Both can play high-resolution audio
Both speakers support high-resolution audio through their respective apps. Sign up to Qobuz, Tidal or even the Spotify Lossless tier, and you’ll be able to play higher quality audio through both speakers.
But there is a catch.
The Sonos platform can accept 24/bit/192kHz audio files but downsamples them to 24-bit/48kHz as that’s Sonos’ ceiling for high resolution audio.
Denon does support up to 24-bit/192kHz, and even better for Hi-Res Audio fans, it supports lossless audio formats such as DSD through its USB input, which Sonos does not support.
Denon offers more built-in connectivity
The Denon Home 200 features a USB-C port (for adding a USB drive or an Ethernet adapter), and a 3.5mm aux input for those who want to play analogue audio.
The Era 100 just has a USB-C input, which can also be used for a hard Internet connection, or to connect to another device (through optional adapters).
If you want to play analogue audio through the Era 100, you need to purchase the Line-In Adapter. With the Denon, you don’t need an adapter to add analogue playback functionality.
Early Verdict
This is just a broad examination of the differences between the Denon Home 200 and the Sonos Era 100. We reviewed the Era 100 several years ago and believe it’s the current benchmark for wireless bookshelf speakers at its price. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved upon.
And the Denon Home 200 does have some noticeable differences. For those that want to hear spatial audio, it supports a virtualised form of it. And it supports a high resolution audio to a better standard than the Sonos, so arguably it may offer greater fidelity with music.
We’ll be looking to see if that is the case once we get our hands on a Home 200 for review.
