Onkyo Controller 4+

This app has not been updated in six months. Listening to music via airplay on my TX-NR6100, Zone1 is vastly different than on Zone2. Z2 even with latest updated app still lacks speaker level/balance and tone (treble, voice & bass) controls when playing music. Even my iphone volume button works on Z1 but not on Z2. Z2 should be made to work just like Z1 so you can make adjustments to music based on environment. Both zones need to add speaker LR balance as well. ONKYO has great products but the quality of the Controller app diminishes the value of this receiver. These changes are needed to significantly increase the listening experience. I emailed the company several months ago and they indicated they would pass this along to their technical team. Nothing yet.

The app feels much more modern and intuitive to use as of the 3.0 update in October, 2022. They finally added a volume knob, sleep timer and concise Interface of audio info within the app while remaining responsive and easy to understand. In addition, there’s some quality of life options such as the ability to add a custom photo of different backgrounds to represent your receiver within the app; nice touch. Nothing is slow and unresponsive like the how the volume and option menu used to be, and overall everything looks seamlessly designed and upgraded for the modern digital age of today. Do not become complacent, Onkyo. This app is excellent now, but it will need to be continuously updated to accommodate new receivers and features.

I’ve had issues with this app detecting my two receivers from my iOS devices. I think I made the mistake of putting the receivers on the 5G WIFI instead of 2.4G. With that change things are working better. For a free app the feature set is fine for my devices - Pandora or media streaming from a Synology NAS media server. One other irritation with Onkyo receivers is that they shouldn’t offer network updates as an option if they are only supported over Ethernet and not WIFI, which is how I have them networked. I have an Ethernet adapter that has helped me several times with recovering from this issue. Again, once I have my ducks lined up - it is a decent system. Zone 2 is my happy place.