Denon Home Sound Bar 550 Soundbar Review

The Denon Home 550 is a simple soundbar. It's mostly plastic, with a tight fabric wrapping around the front and sides of the bar. There's a sensor panel on the top that lights up with the controls when your hand is nearby.

The Denon Home Sound Bar 550 doesn't include a subwoofer, but you can purchase the Denon DSW-1H subwoofer separately if you want.

This setup doesn't include satellites, but you can pair any HEOS-enabled speaker to the bar if you purchase them separately.

The Denon Home Sound Bar 550 has a very compact design. It should easily fit between the legs of a 55" TV stand. Also, it isn't very tall, so it shouldn't block your TV screen unless your TV sits flush on your table.

The back of the bar has an opening for the power cable and the inputs. There are also two universal holes if you want to wall-mount it.

The Denon Home Sound Bar 550 has a great build quality. It's mostly made of plastic, which feels solid and durable. There's also a fabric covering the front and sides of the bar, which feels nice and tight. However, it could collect dust over time.

• Quick Start Guide
• Mounting template
• 2x rubber mounting collars
• Optical cable
• HDMI cable
• Remote with CR2025 battery

The Denon Home Sound Bar 550 has a decent stereo frequency response. Out-of-the-box, it has a slightly boxy sound profile that adds a little extra boom in the bass range, which can please fans of bass-heavy music genres like EDM. The rest of the range is quite neutral and balanced, so vocals and lead instruments reproduce clearly. However, it struggles to reproduce an extended low-bass, so you don't feel the deep rumble in action-packed movie scenes. There are bass and treble adjustments, as well as EQ presets available to help you customize its sound.

Note: When you set up this soundbar using the HEOS app, it asks you whether you're placing the bar on a table or wall-mounting it. However, it doesn't calibrate the bar. We test soundbars on a table.

With calibration, the Denon Home Sound Bar 550 has a decent stereo frequency response. With its bass set to '-3' and its treble set to '1', it offers a slightly more neutral sound profile which still offers a little extra boom in the bass range. It still struggles to reproduce an extended low-bass, which can be disappointing for listeners who like to feel the deep thump and rumble in their audio.

The Denon Home Sound Bar 550 has a decent stereo soundstage performance. Its soundstage is perceived to be a bit wider than the bar itself, but the bar isn't wide to begin with. Its focus is okay, and sound seems to move in large chunks instead of from an accurate, pinpoint location.

The Denon Sound Bar 550 has a disappointing dynamics performance. It doesn't get very loud, and there's a lot of compression when you push it to max volume. As a result, it isn't suitable for listening to audio at loud volumes at parties or in large rooms.

The Denon Sound Bar 550 has a good THD performance. At a normal listening level, the distortion falls mostly within good limits, resulting in a mostly clean and pure audio reproduction. There's a small jump in distortion when you push the bar to max volume, especially in the mid-range. However, this may not be too noticeable with real-life content.

The Denon Sound Bar 550 has a mediocre center channel performance. It doesn't have a discrete center channel, so it uses its left and right speakers to simulate a phantom center. However, this doesn't reproduce dialogue as clearly and accurately as a discrete setup.

The Denon Sound Bar 550 has a poor surrounds performance. It's a 2.0 setup, so it has to downmix surround sound into stereo to play. It doesn't result in a very clear or accurate reproduction, especially when compared to discrete surround speakers. Also, its frequency response lacks low-bass, so you don't feel the deep rumble in action-packed scenes.

The Denon Sound Bar 550 has a poor Atmos performance. It also downmixes this content into stereo, so you can't take advantage of the full immersive feel. Sound effects don't stretch around you—instead, it seems like they're just coming from the space in front of you.

Note: During our testing, the bar played Dolby Atmos files in 'Direct' mode by default. We changed it to the 'Movie' preset using the remote, also called the 'DTS Virtual:X' preset on the app, as it gave Atmos content a more pronounced sound.

The Denon Sound Bar 550 has a poor selection of sound enhancement features. It comes with a few EQ presets, including 'Stereo' (or 'Music' on the remote), 'Dolby Audio', 'Dolby Surround', 'DTS Virtual:X' (or 'Movie' on the remote'), and 'Pure'. The 'DTS Virtual:X' preset doubles as a virtual surround feature to help immerse you in your audio. You can also use the app and the remote to access the Dialogue Enhancer and Night Mode features. However, it lacks a room correction feature, so the bar may sound different depending on the room you use it in.

The Denon Home 550 offers lots of physical inputs. There's a Full HDMI In port, so you can use it as a hub between different devices. Also, the AUX port lets you wire older devices to the bar for audio playback.

The Denon Home Sound Bar 550 has incredible ARC support. It supports Dolby Digital, the most common format for surround sound often found on Blu-ray discs and streaming platforms. Also, it supports lossless and object-based formats like DTS:X.

The Denon Home Sound Bar 550 also offers fantastic audio format support via Full HDMI In. It supports more common audio formats like Dolby Digital, as well as object-based formats like Dolby Atmos.

This soundbar supports both Dolby Digital and DTS via Optical. These formats are mostly on Blu-ray discs and streaming platforms.

The Denon Home 550 has an excellent latency performance. It has fairly low latency via ARC, Optical, and Full HDMI In, so you shouldn't notice a delay between the audio you hear and the video you see. As a result, it's suitable for watching videos and movies over these connections. However, some apps and TVs compensate for latency differently, so your real-world experience may vary.

This soundbar has incredible wireless playback support. You can wirelessly stream audio from your mobile devices to the bar via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Apple AirPlay 2.

The Denon Home Sound Bar 550 can passthrough some of the highest bandwidth signals, so if you connect the bar to your TV and your PC, text on the screen appears clear and crisp. However, it can only do 4k @ 60Hz @ 8-bit passthrough instead of 10 bit, which can be disappointing for some gamers.

There's a small light in the middle of the bar that flashes when you adjust a setting on the remote. It turns orange when you update the bar's software, and it turns green during setup.

On top of the bar, touch-sensitive buttons let you play/pause your audio and adjust the volume. There's a sensor, so when your hand is near the buttons, they light up.

The remote is simple and lets you access the EQ presets, change the input, and adjust the bass. However, it isn't a universal remote, so you can't control your TV with it.

Update 02/08/2022: Thanks to a firmware update in the HEOS app, this soundbar supports Amazon Alexa voice assistant.

The HEOS app acts as a remote and lets you control all of the soundbar's settings. You can switch between different EQ presets, change the bass and treble levels, and access the Dialogue Enhancer and Night Mode features. It also offers integrated support for music streaming services like Spotify, Amazon Music HD, TIDAL, TuneIn, and Deezer, though you may need a separate subscription to access some of them. The manufacturer also says that you can use the app to manage and group multiple Denon Home products, but we don't test this.

Thanks to HDMI CEC support, you can use your TV remote to control the Denon Home Sound Bar 550's basic functions. However, it doesn't have a power-saving feature, so you need to shut it off manually.