dCS VARÈSE

The dCS Varèse is the flagship of dCS’s digital playback range, and it is one of the most expensive audio products in this directory by a wide margin.

dCS began in digital signal processing for professional and defence work, and its consumer products come from that engineering tradition rather than from traditional hi-fi. The Varèse is a modular system built around dCS’s own processing rather than off-the-shelf converter chips, and it is bought and installed as a system rather than as a box.

What Apple Home actually does with it

This is an AirPlay 2 device rather than a HomeKit accessory.

• It shows up in the Home app as a speaker you can play to, and as an AirPlay target in Control Centre.
• You can assign it to a room and group it with HomePods for synchronised multi-room audio.
• Siri can send music to it by room name.
• It can be the audio output in a scene or an automation.

It is not an accessory you switch on or set the volume of from the Home app. Power, input selection and volume stay with the unit, its remote and its own app.

Before you buy

Almost nobody arrives at this page as a purchase decision, and that is fine. If you are here out of curiosity, the useful thing to know is that AirPlay 2 support on a product like this exists for convenience rather than for critical listening: it is how you play a podcast in a room built for something else.

If you are genuinely specifying one, it will be through a dCS dealer with installation and setup included, and the streaming platform will be the least of the decisions.

Specifications