Music Streamers - Recent Thoughts

Things are changing (for the better)

Much as I like the smell of molten solder in the morning, and building my own streamers (here and here), manufacturers are FINALLY figuring out how to do it right. Slim Devices had it right 25 years ago, when they developed a line of streaming players, which were clients for the original open-sourced SlimServer (renamed LMS when Logitech took over and now called Lyrion). Due to a large and active community of volunteers creating open-souce solutions like piCorePlayer, SqueezeLite, and JiveLite, the original concepts have lived on, at least for the DIY crowd. The Lyrion server continues to be supported and enhanced with many plugins available.

Proprietary turn-key solutions like Sonos have been around for decades, but they are not very flexible and lock you in to a narrow (and costly) ecosystem. Slim Devices systems required people to have a certain level of geekiness to get things working, and this limited wider consumer-level acceptance. The lesson here is, like smart phones and ear buds, people want simple solutions that don't require fiddly tweaking. On the other hand, us "audiophile" idiots do not mind endless experiments to achieve the ultimate sound at reasonable price points (and a lot of unreasonable price points).

Some of the mainstream A/V makers have incorporated streaming into their products with varying success and usability.

Smaller makers such as WiiM have produced usable streaming components and are achieving pretty good market penetration.

In 2024, WiiM had a breakthrough of sorts with its WiiM Ultra budget streamer/preamp. At $330 US, it blew away the competition and got some very positive reviews. What sets it apart is that it works with almost all the streaming services - take your pick. In my case, I like Qobuz - and it provides a bunch of nice features, including a decent ESS DAC. I cannot build a decent streamer for that amount of money! Plus, incorporating all of the WiiM's features would require serious engineering add-ons to something like piCorePlayer.

There are competing boxes from vendors like EverSolo, but they cost twice as much to start and go up from there. E.g., $859 will get you a larger screen, balanced outputs and better DACs. Cambridge Audio makes one for $1,000 and there are others.

They followed it up with an integrated amp version, the WiiM Amp Ultra, but that seems to me to be putting too much into a single small enclosure. I like the flexibility of separate amps.

But what really caught my eye was the fact that the Ultra can integrate with Lyrion, so in my case, it works with my existing library of ripped CDs stored on my Lyrion servers.

More than that, it integrates with Alexa voice commands, something I had long wished for. My S.O. likes her Echo Dot so she can ask Alexa to play her favorite tunes. This has kept her from using my streamers, which lack voice control. [Yes - there is an existing Alexa solution for piCorePlayer, but it requires yet another subscription to a cloud service and is cumbersome to set up and maintain - no thanks.]

The WiiM Ultra is described as a preamp with streaming capabilities. It has multiple inputs (even HDMI and phono) and and a small touch screen display. I am pretty sure the engineers at WiiM took some of the good ideas from Squeeze-based players and incorporated them in the design. Since it can act as a Lyrion client, you can use the web-based Material Skin to control it remotely. Many users have commented that this is way better than using the WiiM app on a smart device, although the app is needed for setup and configuration. And it supports multi-room synchronization, meaning you can have multiple players in different rooms (including piCorePlayers and SqueezeLite players) playing the same music simultaneously.

There is also a feature for active room equalization, using DSP technology - that is a big plus, assuming it is not sonically annoying. I have not seen any technical reviews that measure the impact of the DSP settings. Another plus is a headphone jack on the front panel.

There is an active forum hosted by WiiM and I believe user feedback gets the attention of the engineering team. If you look at the firmware release notes during 2025, there is a series of continuing improvements, so that is encouraging for those who care about future-proof devices, like me.

There are some YouTube audiophile pundits claiming that the Ultra sounds much better with an external DAC, but I think the improvement is more about bypassing the analog and DSP parts of the Ultra. The Ultra is what it is: a versatile stremer/DAC/preamp with a lot of features at a very low price point. You could get your knickers in a twist by adding an external DAC, then feeding the analog outputs back into the Ultra to take advantage of input selection, room correction, but what's the point?

I had gifted one of these to a family member, and after setting it up and seeing some of the features, I decided to get one for myself. This is not for my primary listening system, but more for casual listening and background music in multiple rooms.

Initial Impressions

The Ultra is very well constructed - the case is mainly aluminum with a rounded plastic front panel for the display and a large single function volume knob, that has an LED pointer. The LED serves as a status indicator. It has a built-in power supply, so no wall-warts for a change. Setup is straight forward using the WiiM Home smartphone app, and the first thing that happens after connecting it to WiFi is a firmware update, which includes a few reboots. The display and the app are nicely done and provide progress feedback. The whole initialization process took about 10 minutes.

One thing I discovered quickly was that the touch screen, unlike a piCorePlayer with Jivelite, has limited functionality. It only allows for basic player functions like the display of artwork for the currently playing selection, progress, stop, start, screen brightness, input selection, and some VU and spectrum visualizations (set by the app), etc. and does not allow music selection from your library or streaming service. WiiM has decided that that should be controlled remotely with it's WiiM Home app or with Lyrion in my case. I missed the full touch screen functionality I had with piCorePlayer. One unit I built had a 5" touchscreen is very flexible in terms of music selection. On the other hand I do find myself using the Material Skin for Lyrion on an iPad and computer web interfaces, more often than not, and that works fine with the WiiM.

Digging into the forum, many owners have requested more functionality in the touch interface, mainly around music selection. Since the behavior of the Ultra seems to be pretty much firmware-defined, I would expect some enhancements along those lines eventually.

The Ultra does not have the ability to install apps locally, unlike the EverSolos, which are Android-based. Some owners complain that this is a drawback. I am not so sure. If WiiM adds more features and icons to the screen over time, that would be a welcome enhancement.

Getting it working with my Lyrion server was seamless - the player just showed up in the Lyrion interface and started working with my music library and Qobuz streaming. I did try Qobuz directly to the Ultra (using the Home app) and noticed a couple of freezes - presumably due to flakey internet connection directly to the Ultra - but streaming from the Lyrion over WiFi seemed stable (in fairness, the Lyrion server in this case has a direct ethernet connection to my router).

The Home app is quite full-featured. It allows equalization, room correction using a smartphone mic, and selection of all the supported streaming services.

How does it sound? Very good. I am running it through a couple of Fosi V3 amps connected to Monitor Audio Silver 50 7G bookshelf speakers. I tried setting the EQ to classical, which does a slight bass and treble boost over the midrange frequencies. More listening is required. The Monitors are brand new and could do with a little break-in. I also tried the room EQ and that appears to be working; it is a nice feature. I used my iPhone's mic with the app for this so not exactly expected to be precise. Lately, I have all that turned off and listening with flat settings. I plugged the rear ports on the Monitors with the supplied foam and notice more bass (they speakers are set into bookshelves, so plugging the ports is recommended).

One minor issue with WiFi cropped up. I initially set up the Ultra on a 2.4 GHz SSID band. Everything worked but after a day or so it could not connect to WiFi. I looked at the WiiM Home app and noticed that the device settings for WiFi were set to 5 GHz ONLY. So when it tried to re-connect (for whatever reason) it could not. I reset the WiFi to a 5 GHz channel on a different SSID and that worked. Looking at the forums, it seems that WiiM prefers 5 GHz, although that is causing some users to have problems with range. My Ultra is pretty close to my AP, so signal strength at 5 GHz is not a problem. Some people are questioning the need to force the use of the higher band. I think that WiiM is making the suggestion of 5 GHz out of concern over IoT device crowding in the 2.4 GHz band more than anything else, since 2.4 GHz is more than adequate for audio streaming, even hi-rez files.

I also tried my ancient Sony ES CD changer using the Ultra's analog RCA inputs and that works perfectly. I have not tried the optical interface, but that may result in better sound since the Sony is so old (20+ years).

Another nice feature I recently came across: the Ultra firmware allows you to tweak the internal ESS ES9038Q2M DAC with 7 different filter settings via the app. The default is Linear Phase Fast Rolloff, but you can play with the others to see if you have a listening preference. In one of my streamer builds, I had intended to try Ian Canada's ESS tweaker, but I think the Ultra will tell me if the different filters make much difference.

So I can recommend the Ultra to anyone looking at a full-featured streaming "pre-amp" on a budget I may even get a cheap turntable to play some of the LPs I have had stashed away for over 30 years.