Denon

The brand

History

Denon's story begins in 1910, when the American entrepreneur Frederick Whitney Horn founded Nippon Chikuonki Shokai (Nipponophone), the first company in Japan to manufacture and sell phonographs — a milestone that practically launched the Japanese audio industry. Over the following decades, successive mergers (including the formation of Japan Denki Onkyo in 1934, whose contraction gave rise to the name "Denon" itself) established the company as the official supplier of recording equipment to NHK, Japan's public broadcaster, responsible even for the historic recording of Emperor Hirohito's voice in 1945.

With more than 115 years of continuous history, Denon has a list of firsts rarely matched by any brand in the industry: Japan's first disc recorder (1939), the world's first practical digital PCM recorder (1972, the DN-023R), the world's first CD player (1981, the DN-3000F) and the first home system with Dolby Digital and THX 5.1 decoding (1995). In the modern home theater era, the brand remains a leader in AV receivers — from the first receiver with HDMI, Audyssey and network connectivity (2000) to the first receiver with native Dolby Atmos support (2014), by way of the world's first 13.2-channel AV receiver (2018) and the first with 8K video (2020).

Now part of the Harman group, Denon keeps alive the philosophy that has guided it since 1910: the belief that "better sound leads to a happier life", combining Japanese technical rigour with a constant commitment to innovation that anticipates the market's needs before the market even notices them.