Great review. Steer away from it. Why no manufacturer can make a complete box with good tablet interface, featuring the possibility to use your own music collection from a SSD HD, inspired by the (very expensive) MAN-301 by Weiss, and for less than $ 500? It should not be an insoluble problem. Topping was selling a decent music server for close to $ 200, with a poor user interface and problems of signal crosstalk. Cambridge sells a decent server with streaming capabilities for around $ 1,000, with a very poor interface. Other manufacturers’ products are very confusing: even reading the manual you are left with doubts: will it play my 84,000 FLAC files music collection?
This can definitely play your local music files. You can plug in a drive to the USB port and it can read and access and play all of your files from there.
The music will then appear in your app.
In my opinion, anything with HEOS rates Poor -> Ridiculous because of the terrible user interface. HEOS seems to just be a way for Denon et al to have a placeholder in the market.
What about the user interface is terrible? I mean honestly I have had Heos products for 10 years and I mostly just open Spotify and press play.
Even if you want to play a local radio station through tune in or iHeart Radio, it only takes a few taps and you are listening to what you want.
Very poor, $350 for just a digital output is just a terrible value proposition. Should cost $125-ish.
To be fair, it is not just a digital out. It does work via RCA and to be completely honest, unless you are connecting this to a very expensive speaker system, the rather dismal DAC performance is actually totally fine for 99% of content.
I definitely wouldn't use this for my headphone amp as obviously this would not be up to the standard but I personally tested it with a couple different sound bars that I use in my bedroom for sleeping and it sounds completely fine.
I realistically use this to put on music while I go to sleep and my wife uses it to play music in our bedroom while she folds closed or does other around the house tasks.
Using this is quite a big upgrade versus connecting via Bluetooth to the sound bar, especially when the Bluetooth drains the battery of my phone and still sounds like a wet paper towel.
I even went on a trip and left my heos playing music for my dog before... 30hr+ long Playlist and it's fine.
9/10 times the app doesn't need to be opened if playing Spotify (or even Tidal once it's setup).