My eldest will be moving out into his own place soon (yay! etc) and will be taking my old Bluesound Node (mk1) with him.
The Wiim streamers seem to be very well regarded, so I’m considering buying one. The Wiim Ultra appears to tick all the boxes and is very reasonably priced. I’m a sucker for a colour display (you know, in case I ever forget what the cover of Rumours looks like…).
I’d be connecting the streamer to the digital input on my Gato Dia-250 (which has decent internal dacs). As a family, we mostly stream from Amazon Music, though I also have a large number of CD rips (carefully tagged in Itunes and stored on hard drive - which I will eventually get round to connecting to my Synology NAS). It would be good to be able to play those through the Wiim, assuming it will do that. It would also be good if control of the system could be via a tablet (or similar) so that anyone in the family can choose the tunes.
Is the Wiim a good choice based on the above? If I could forego the colour screen, would I be missing much else by opting for one of the cheaper Wiim models?
What to you reckon?
As a side note, I’ve been thinking about migrating the CD rips across from Itunes to something more widely ‘compatible’, but have always been a bit wary of Apple’s batshit tagging and storage system. I really don’t want to have to spend hours fixing tags, album art etc. Is this still a legitimate concern these days?
I bought the Wiim Pro for my youngest. She uses it to stream from TIDAL. I set it up to read the library on my Inuous Zen but she doesn’t like the music I have on there. She runs it using her iPhone or iPad. I’ve had zero, and I mean zero, issues, complaints or need to intervene in the year she has had it. Best £150 I’ve spent on HiFi
The Wiim will be perfectly respectable choice for this. It’s generally bombpoof and logical to use. I don’t actually like using the app for browsing music (it’s a personal thing but the absence of a grid view and the slightly clunky search functions annoy me) but it’s a long way from bad.
Weirdly, the cheaper Pro+ model has better file handling than the Ultra and has exactly the same platform (it does without a display, HDMI ARC and phono stage- no really, the Ultra has a phono stage- though if you care). The Ultra also has a USB out which can be handy in some DAC setups while the Pro and Pro+ would be coax and optical only.
The key thing is, there isn’t much in the way of competition. The Cambridge Audio MXN10 is a nicer thing to use and I think it sounds fractionally better but it has no display and doesn’t support Amazon. The Bluesound Node Nano does support Amazon and it’s a nice thing but Bluesound really only comes into its own if you intend to buy many rooms of the stuff.
Had a Pro Plus and it worked great and the app was excellent.
Just wasn’t impressed with the sound, bit insipid and flat, but if you aren’t using the built in Dac it might be fine.
Thanks. The rips are all in Apple Lossless (which pretty much everything can play these days, I think). The dream solution would be a player that will simply read, index and play the whole file structure as is, keeping the albums, art and all the rest just as they are…
A little late to the party here as it seems you’ve already taken the plunge, but I have to agree with all of the above comments. I use a pro+ connected to the dac in my Audiolab A6000 via coax. I’m very happy with the way it works, have had no issues in the year I’ve owned it and am considering buying another to use in a multi-room setup to replace the Chromecast Audio devices I currently use. Sounds wise I reckon it’s better than my old Cambridge Audio Sonata streamer and is beaten by my Audiolab C7000, but only just! (same music, CD rips v’s CD)
I’ve seen it called the Hi-fi bargain of the century in many places and have to agree.
It’s bafflingly good, even via line-out into the amp in my second system. I can only imagine how much better it will do via digital out feeding my Gato-Dia-250.
There’s nothing I need from the Wiim that it doesn’t do, it sounds great and the app is easy to navigate.
