MMM DENON! - Denon Home Soundbar 550

A stylish, well-built compact sound bar that will power up your TV audio with Dolby Atmos and DTS:X

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SPECIFICATIONS

Drivers 6 (2 x 19mm tweeter, 4 x 55mm full-range, 3 x 50x90mm passive radiator

Connectivity 4K HDMI (1 x eARC), Digital Optical, USB, Ethernet, 3.5mm jack input, Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 3.0

Dimensions 650x75x120mm

Weight 3.5kg

The Denon Home 550 has got a lot of the right ingredients. It's compact and discreet, nicely made, properly finished and better-specified than many of its competitors for the price you pay. But can it knock our current favourite small-ish soundbar - the Sonos Beam Gen 2 - off its perch?

Let's kick off with an additional HDMI socket. Unlike the Sonos Beam Gen 2, with its single HDMI CARC socket, the Home 550 adds an HDMI input - so you don't have to take up one of your TV's HDMI inputs if you don't need to. A seemingly obvious course of action, but not as obvious to some competing brands it seems.

The HDMI sockets support 4K, HDR10 and Dolby Vision too. And in the little recess at the back of the bar, they are joined by a digital optical input, an Ethernet socket, a 3.5mm analogue input and a USB socket. Add in dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and it's hard to know how much more flexibility you could expect.

And that's before you consider the HEOS platform developed by Denon and its Marantz sibling. As well as a degree of control, the HEOS app allows you to integrate streaming services, TuneIn internet radio and local network-attached storage devices.