With Denon's announcement of the DNP-2000NE Network Player, two trends in HiFi and home music reproduction may have just converged without anyone even noticing. The first is "immersive sound" (surround sound augmented by height). The second is the wild popularity of "network streamers" - purpose-built devices intended to bring the entire world of music into your living room. Until now, never the twain shall meet. But that may be about to change.
Immersive sound first appeared in movie theaters with formats like Auro 3D, Dolby Atmos, IMAX and DTS:X. Expanding traditional surround sound by adding a new dimension - height - made movies sound much more enveloping, more "immersive." Immersive sound soon made it from movie theaters to living rooms and home theaters. These days even budget receivers and soundbars have some form of immersive sound support. And now you can find thousands of movies and TV show episodes in immersive surround sound. Most of these are in Dolby Atmos, with a handful of titles available in IMAX Enhanced (DTS:X) format on select platforms.
More recently, immersive sound has crept into music. Apple Music calls it "Spatial Audio" but it's really the same thing: surround sound augmented by height information to create a truly three dimensional soundscape. As we speak, recording artists, producers and engineers are not only releasing new albums in immersive formats (Dolby Atmos and Sony's Reality 360 Audio), but they're going back to the original master tapes to remix and re-release classic songs and albums in three dimensional immersive sound. You can hear new albums by Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, BTS and Billie Eilish in Dolby Atmos. But also classics from the Beatles, The Doors, Fleetwood Mac and Marvin Gaye are being remixed and re-released in the format.
At last count, Apple Music alone had over 60,000 tracks available in Dolby Atmos. TIDAL and Amazon Music also support the format with a rich selection of immersive music tracks. Once you've heard your favorite music in Dolby Atmos or 360 Reality Audio through speakers on a good playback system, it's hard to go back to regular stereo.
But actually hearing your music over speakers in immersive format isn't as easy as it should be. Sonos supports Dolby Atmos music in Apple Music and Amazon Music but not in TIDAL (yet). If you have an Apple TV 4K streamer, you can plug that into any Dolby Atmos-compatible receiver or soundbar and listen to immersive music from TIDAL or Apple Music (but not Amazon Music). Oddly enough, Amazon's own streaming devices, the FireTV stick and FireTV cube support Dolby Atmos in TIDAL but not from their own music streaming service, Amazon Music. And Amazon devices don't yet support Apple Music in any form. Also, playing music on a video streaming box like an Apple TV 4K or FireTV Stick is awkward. You have to leave your TV or projector on to navigate songs, and after a few tunes, many of these apps go into a screen saver mode and eventually stop playing music due to a lack of input from the user.
Music streamers, also called "network players" or "network streamers" are purpose-built for playing music. Streamers from companies such as NAD, Cambridge Audio, Naim, Audio Engine and BlueSound integrate with streaming apps like Tidal, Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music and Amazon Music. These devices allow you to access music from these streaming services or from your own local digital music collection on your home network. They also allow you to listen to podcasts or to internet radio stations like Radio Paradise in CD quality or sometimes even higher. They don't require a connection to a TV. They're for playing music and they do so extremely well.
But there's one problem: none of these network streamers currently support immersive audio. For a network streamer to support immersive audio, it would need to be able to pass a multi-channel audio stream to a receiver or amplifier. There are three ways this can work: over a network connection like Chromecast, over a multi-channel analog output or over an HDMI cable. Multi-channel immersive audio cannot be delivered over coaxial or fiberoptic "Toslink" connection or over stereo analog connections which is what we find on most of these network streamers.
So when Denon announced this week that it had a new high-end network audio player (the DNP-2000NE), I noticed something different: it has an HDMI port. And while Denon's announcement said nothing specific about support for immersive audio formats like Dolby Atmos or 360 Reality Audio, that HDMI port means that the hardware at least is able to handle multi-channel immersive audio, something that can't be said about its competition. Denon's release did hint at the player providing an "immersive music experience" but there was no additional detail as to what that meant.
My feeling is that there is more to this product story than meets the eye, but the company isn't ready yet to make the announcements that will need to be made to make this product truly "immersive." My guess is that Denon may be preparing to enhance its HEOS whole home music and streaming platform, making it compatible with immersive sound formats like Dolby Atmos and potentially even with Sony 360 Reality Audio. Denon's competitor Sonos already supports Dolby Atmos immersive sound in Apple Music and Amazon Music so it would make sense that Denon would beef up its own HEOS platform to compete.
Another little hint that Denon is keeping its cards close to its chest is that the latest batch of Denon receivers claims support for Sony 360 Reality Audio (a competitor to Dolby Atmos). But when you drill down on this support, Denon only says that "Select Denon AV receivers are capable of 360 Reality Audio playback by connecting a 360RA streaming device via HDMI. Stay tuned for further updates!" The only problem? There are currently no streaming devices that support 360 Reality Audio that have HDMI outputs. So could Denon's own DNP-2000NE be the first such device? We shall see.
At the very least, the new player's HDMI port means it has the hardware required to do multi-channel immersive audio, which is more than can be said for virtually all of its competition. Whether Denon actually exploits this hardware advantage - and whether customers care enough about immersive music to buy it - remains to be seen.
We have reached out to Denon for additional details as to how the DNP-2000NE will provide an "immersive music experience."
UPDATE: A Denon rep got back to us to explain their use of the words "immersive music" when announcing the DNP-2000NE. Here was their response:
"The DNP-2000NE is designed to reproduce music as the artist intended, as if you are immersed in the studio while the music is being recorded. [This is] not to imply that this is a multichannel decoding piece or that it features any upmixing or virtualization technologies. So, it does not feature Dolby Atmos or 360RA, but what it does feature is simple 2 channel Hi-Fi with no compromises."
Of course, we never expected that the DNP-2000NE would decode Dolby Atmos or 360 Reality Audio -- just as video streamers like the Amazon FireTV Stick and Apple TV do not decode Dolby Atmos -- only that it could potentially pass these formats through to a compatible receiver or preamp/processor in the future. And since the unit features an HDMI port, this is still true. If and when Denon's HEOS streaming platform supports immersive audio, the DNP-2000NE could potentially become immersive-sound-compatible, thanks to its HDMI output.
If things change, we'll be sure to update this article.
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