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Dirigo

A proper remote for Marantz and Denon receivers, with deep Apple TV integration.

statusNow Available
priceFree · $7.99 in-app
platformsiOS · iPadOS · watchOS
Dirigo app icon
App 02 / 0001 · AV · Home utility

Dirigo

Now Available

A proper remote for Marantz and Denon receivers, with deep Apple TV integration.

Dirigo talks to Marantz and Denon AVRs directly on your Wi-Fi — no telnet, no cloud round-trips, no account. Power, volume, inputs, zones, surround modes, room correction, and the settings pages your physical remote pretends don't exist. HEOS streaming is built in. Pair an Apple TV and the app gains a touchpad remote plus a live now-playing card that reads what's on screen. The UI only shows features your specific receiver model supports.

  • Full control: power, volume, input, surround, multi-zone
  • Deep settings — room correction, speaker levels, HDMI, video
  • HEOS music browsing, queue, and now-playing
  • Pair an Apple TV and use Dirigo as its remote
  • Works with Apple TVs set to require an AirPlay password
  • Live now-playing card for the Apple TV — title, artwork, transport
  • Bonjour discovery, App Intents, and Siri Shortcuts
  • Home and lock-screen widgets
  • Optionally, your iPhone's own volume buttons drive the receiver
  • Apple Watch app — power, volume on the Digital Crown, input, and Quick Select
  • Watch face complication that launches it
  • Demo Mode for exploring the UI without your receiver awake
Platforms iOS · iPadOS · watchOS
Minimum iOS 18 · watchOS 11
Price Free for 3 days, then $7.99 once
Dirigo home screen on iPhone: the Living Room receiver's Main Zone with the Apple TV input selected on HDMI1, a master volume slider at 45, Dolby Atmos as the current sound mode, and quick actions for signal info, speakers, input, quick select, dialog enhancer, and mute.

iPhone

The full receiver, one screen at a time.

Dirigo's Apple TV remote screen: a Touchpad and D-Pad selector, a large touch area reading "Touch to navigate", round Back, Home, Control, and Apps buttons, a volume slider at 45, and rewind, play/pause, and fast-forward transport controls. A green dot beside "Living Room Apple TV" shows it is connected.

Apple TV remote, built in

Pair a tvOS device once and Dirigo becomes its remote — a swipe pad, or a D-Pad if you would rather have buttons, plus Back, Home, Control Centre, and the app switcher. The volume slider underneath drives the receiver, not the TV, so one screen covers both. There is no public iOS framework for this: Dirigo speaks the same network pairing protocols Apple's own Remote uses.

Dirigo's receiver remote screen: a green Power button and an Input button, a directional pad with a centre Enter button, info and menu buttons, rewind, play, pause, stop and fast-forward transport controls, a volume slider at 45, and four Quick Select preset buttons numbered 1 to 4.

The remote your receiver never shipped with

Power and input at the top, a real directional pad with Enter for driving the receiver's on-screen menus, full transport controls, and the four Quick Select presets along the bottom. Everything the physical remote does, without hunting for the right button in a dark room.

Dirigo's Speaker Setup screen showing a 7.1.4 speaker layout as a top-down diagram: front left, centre and front right in blue and green, four height channels in magenta, surround and surround-back channels in orange, and a subwoofer in red, each labelled plus 0.0 decibels around a listener icon. Below, per-channel level sliders for front left, front right, centre and surround left.

Every speaker, mapped and trimmed

A top-down view of your actual layout — here a 7.1.4 system, with the four height channels picked out in magenta — and an individual level trim for each channel. Changes are sent straight to the receiver, so you can balance the room from the sofa instead of crouching at the front panel.

Dirigo's Surround and Upmixing screen: Surround Mode set to Auto and Subwoofer Mode to LFE, then surround parameters for Effect Level at 50 percent, Center Spread off, Dimension at 0, Center Width at 3, and a Panorama switch. A note reads that greyed-out controls aren't active for the current sound mode. Below, a Height / Atmos section with Height Gain set to Medium.

Surround and upmixing, in detail

Choose how audio is decoded and upmixed to your layout, then fine-tune the spatial processing — effect level, centre width, panorama, Atmos height gain. Controls your current sound mode doesn't use are greyed out rather than hidden, so you can see what exists without guessing why it isn't working.

Dirigo's Room Correction screen: an Audyssey section with MultEQ XT32 set to Reference, Dynamic EQ switched on, Reference Level Offset at 0 dB and Dynamic Volume off; a Dirac Live section showing status; and an LFE section with LFE Level at minus 5 dB and a low-pass filter for LFE at 120 Hz.

Audyssey and Dirac Live, brought to the surface

The calibration settings normally buried several menus deep: the MultEQ curve, Dynamic EQ and Dynamic Volume, reference level offset, and separate subwoofer level and low-pass controls. Dirac Live status is read back from the receiver on models that support it.

Dirigo's Inputs screen listing Apple TV on HDMI1, Game Console on HDMI2, Blu-ray on BD, TV Audio on TV, and Streaming on NET — each with a custom icon and an on/off switch. A note explains that input names sync to the receiver while icons and images stay on the device, above a Refresh Names from Receiver button.

Inputs, named the way you think of them

Switch off the inputs you never use so they stop appearing on the receiver and in the app, and rename the ones you do — with your own icon and colour. Names sync back to the receiver so its front panel agrees with your phone; icons and artwork stay local to your device.

Dirigo's main menu: Home and Music at the top, then a Receiver Remote section listing Living Room, an Apple TV Remotes section listing Living Room Apple TV, and a Setup and Settings section with Manage Receivers, the Living Room receiver marked Active with a green dot, App Settings, Manage Apple TV Remotes, and Help & Reference.

One list, everything reachable

Each receiver and each paired Apple TV gets its own remote entry, with music, zones, and every settings panel a tap away. The green dot and Active tag show which receiver the app is talking to right now — useful once you have more than one.

Apple Watch

Receiver control from the wrist — over Wi‑Fi directly, so it keeps working with your iPhone in another room.

Dirigo on Apple Watch: the Living Room receiver showing the Apple TV input with a green connected dot, the volume at 45 with a Digital Crown indicator beside it, a wide Mute button, and a row of Input, Quick and power buttons.

On your wrist, without your phone

The whole receiver on one screen: volume on the Digital Crown, mute, input, Quick Select, and power. The watch talks to the receiver over Wi-Fi directly, so it keeps working with your iPhone in another room — and falls back to the phone only when it has to.

Dirigo's input picker on Apple Watch, listing Apple TV with a checkmark, Xbox Series X and Turntable, each with its own icon.

Your inputs, by your names

The same custom names and icons you set on the phone, on the watch — so it says Turntable, not PHONO. Tap one to switch the receiver.

Dirigo's Quick Select picker on Apple Watch, listing Movie Night, Vinyl and Quick Select 3, each with a star icon.

Quick Select from the wrist

Your receiver's presets, named as you named them. One tap sets the input, sound mode and volume together — the whole room, from a watch face.

iPad

The same app, laid out for a bigger screen.

Dirigo on iPad: a sidebar listing Home, Music, the Living Room receiver remote, the Living Room Apple TV remote, a Zone Selection section showing Main Zone active at volume 45 and Zone 2 off, and setup entries — beside a detail pane showing the Apple TV input on HDMI1, the volume slider, Dolby Atmos sound mode, and the same quick actions as on iPhone.

On iPad, the whole system at once

The same app adapts to a sidebar layout, so navigation, both remotes, and zone switching stay visible while the receiver controls fill the rest of the screen. Zone Selection puts Main Zone and Zone 2 side by side with their current volume and power state — handy when the second zone is feeding another room.

Screenshots are captured in the app's built-in Demo Mode: the receiver, Apple TV, room, and input names shown are sample data, not a real system. Apple TV is a trademark of Apple Inc.

Privacy

Dirigo collects no analytics, identifiers, or tracking. All receiver and Apple TV control happens on your local network. Apple TV now-playing artwork is delivered in-band by the paired device. HEOS streaming browsing loads album art directly from the music service's image URLs through standard iOS networking. Read the full privacy policy →

Compatibility

Tested with current-generation Marantz and Denon AV receivers that support HEOS and expose the standard control HTTP and UPnP endpoints (Cinema 50 / SR-series, AVR-X-series, and similar). The UI hides features your specific model does not expose.