Is Wiim for me?

[ResumeMan]

Hi folks I'm cross-posting this from the Reddit sub,

I've poked around on Wiim info a bit, but frankly not very much. I'm now in a relatively urgent moment to buy a new stereo amp of some kind, and I'm thinking of jumping into a Wiim amp, as well as one of the non-amp streamers for another room.

Let me try to describe my situation and general orientation toward music. This ecosystsem *might* be great for me, or it might just totally miss my needs...

- We're not exactly audiophiles, but we do love/obsess over music and certainly want good quality

- We do not, and probably never will, subscribe to any streaming services, like Spotify, Tidal, etc. That's not how we get our music.

- We listen to a rather extensive collection of music (mostly FLAC/mp3s) that we store on sort of a home-made NAS using OpenMediaVault

- We do stream music off both the Live Music Archive and YouTube(the latter quite extensively). Also streaming radio stations from their websites.

- We currently have a very very very old analog stereo receiver connected to some vintage speakers. Essentially the only input we ever use to this is from a PC connected via a cheap DAC. This PC is used to stream both internet content and stuff from the OMV server

- This receiver is dying and urgently needs to be replaced. I'd like to keep using the speakers, so to replace it with another amp rather than powered speakers or something.

- Here's where we start thinking about Wiim: We also listen to music in another room. All of this music originates at the same PC as plays the receiver.

- In the other room, the music plays via a SVS amp with built in DTS Play-Fi. So we generally just use the Play-Fi app installed in the PC to just shove all the sound from the PC to the SVS, whether it is playing stored music from a music app or YouTube. The Play-Fi...works. Kind of. Frankly it's always been pretty janky, and I wouldn't mind at all using something that's more reliable.

- So what I'm thinking of is to get a Wiim Amp to replace the dying receiver, and also get a Wiim Pro or similar to put next to the SVS amp, basically turning that into just an amp getting its input from the Wiim pro.

- We would then do...something...still learning about this - but I think we would create a multi-room group to be able to play the music from the PC to the Wiim amp, and/or also play it at the Wiim Pro in the other room, to feed the SVS amp.

Does this make sense? Is it a viable solution to my use case? Or am I just missing the point of Wiim because I don't stream anything anywhere but networked files and YouTube to the single PC? The other option would be to just get an un-networked amp to connect to the PC to play in that room, and keep using the Pay-Fi to get to the other room.

Appreciate your help in navigating this dinosaur through the Wiim world! Thanks in advance.

 

[castalla]

Do you require YouTube video or just the audio? And are you talking free youtube or subscription?

 

[ResumeMan]

Just the audio in this case. I do watch the videos in some cases, but what I'm talking about is just getting the music to the other room from the main setup. And yes, just regular old YouTube, no sub. The main thing being "get all the sound from the computer in the office to play in the living room"

 

[castalla]

Just the audio in this case. I do watch the videos in some cases, but what I'm talking about is just getting the music to the other room from the main setup. And yes, just regular old YouTube, no sub. The main thing being "get all the sound from the computer in the office to play in the living room"

If you use Chrome browser on Windows PC you can cast to Wiim devices (except Mini) from the youtube video playing on the PC. Why not take out a YT music sub?

 

[Mr Ee]

Essentially the only input we ever use to this is from a PC connected via a cheap DAC.

If you want to keep this simplicity then yes, connecting that dac to a wiim amp's analog in will work.
In that regard it'd be essentially the same as your current, dying amp.
You could have a pro, or similar, in the other room that you link with the wiim amp so it plays the same music to that svs amp. You might need to do a little bit of fiddling with latency settings on either / both wiims to get them to play in sync.

The questions about video are 'cos the wiim amp will introduce a small delay. It converts the analog signal to digital, does whatever EQ, volume etc. processing and then converts back to analog. This could make lip sync an issue, especially when the pro is grouped with the amp.
For grouping, wiim do have a group audio delay setting to try to mitigate this, with the values ranging from 70ms to 800ms.
You'd use the former for video (which gives acceptable lip sync for some, not quite low enough for others), and possibly use higher values for just music as the goal there is stability in the group, i.e. no audio dropouts.

I don't know anything about OpenMediaVault, but it seems quite possible you could stream that directly to the wiim amp or pro without going via the dac attached to the pc, somewhat similar to how you send music directly to the svs amp.