Wiim pro initial impression

[JonnyH]

I received my much anticipated Wiim pro yesterday. I ordered it from amazon.com US and had it shipped to me in Scotland. Previously I have been streaming from my iPad into a chord mojo 2 dac and out to my pre-and power amplifiers and to speakers. I have been very happy with the sound but as I use TIDAL I was having to get out of my chair to browse and choose content from the Hifi set up where iPad was situated.My thoughts were that by using the Wiim Pro I would be able to do this remotely with no loss of quality to the sound.
I connected the wiim pro using the coaxial out to the coaxial in of my Chord Mojo 2. Set up of the hardware and settings within the Wiim home app as has been previously stated by many people was easy.
As I use tidal Hifi which is 44.1khz/16 bit this is what I set what I set the coaxial out resolution at.
My impressions…
Yesterday I spent some long periods listening to music and was sort of happy but in the back of my mind I was not quite sure that the quality was what it had been without the Wiim. It was just slightly dull. Then today my doubts motivated me to unplug the Wiim and stream the output tidal directly out of my ipad via it’s lightning cable to the Chord Mojo 2 dac and there it was again…all of the beautiful high frequency detail and dynamics that had been missing with the Wiim doing the streaming.
This got me thinking that I had missed something in the setup process. Maybe the Wiim internal dac was still in the signal path? Not so as far as I can tell. I have done a factory reset and been through the setup process again, checked my audio input/output settings,eq,WiFi is good and everything seems to be set as it should and yet the sound streamed from the Wiim through my Chord Dac is significantly inferior to that of when streamed from my iPad through the Chord Dac.
I’ve tried searching for a reason for this lack of clarity that I’ve been experiencing but with no success.
If anyone has any suggestions, I’d be very grateful if you’d pass them on otherwise I’ll need to revert back to my original setup and sell on the Wiim.
Thanks Jonny

 

[cc_rider]

Unless you're doing this test double-blind, with someone switching instantly back and forth between the two sources without you knowing which is which, it's most likely all in your imagination. The WiiM digital output is bit-perfect and extremely low THD+N, so unless you have the WiiM's EQ enabled, there shouldn't be any difference.

 

[JonnyH]

Unless you're doing this test double-blind, with someone switching instantly back and forth between the two sources without you knowing which is which, it's most likely all in your imagination. The WiiM digital output is bit-perfect and extremely low THD+N, so unless you have the WiiM's EQ enabled, there shouldn't be any difference.

You would think so, but actually it’s quite a noticeable difference. The eq isn’t engaged. Believe me I’d love it if was in my imagination but unfortunately it isn’t. I’m just looking for a solution because I was really excited to have the Wiim as part of my setup, but it would be a big step backwards in terms of fidelity for the convenience of remotely accessing content, which at the point of spending £500 on a DAC would be quite ridiculous. There must be a reason for what I’m hearing! I really do think there must be something in the setup process that I’m completely blind to as I can’t believe I’d be the only person with an issue if this were not the case!

 

[d6jg]

Try setting the digital out to match the capability of the DAC rather than matching the bit rate from Tidal

Edit. Use the test thing but it should be 24/192

 

[d6jg]

Also try the optical out using the supplied cable from WiiM. Elsewhere someone posted that his expensive optical cable wouldn’t work but the supplied one did!

 

[Balthazar B]

@JonnyH, and it's possible your coax cable is compromising the sound. There are more than a few crappy ones out there. See the following article for a discussion of how a good and proper (and not outrageously expensive) digital signal coax cable should be engineered:

Is There Such a Thing as a 75 Ohm RCA Plug? -- Blue Jeans Cable

 

[Klipscher]

You also should also turn on MQA core beta and then should get tidal in 24/88 or 96GHz on tidal masters.

 

[DryTortuga]

From a troubleshooting standpoint - definitely try the included optical cable and try another source (e.g., Radio Paradise Flac).

 

[Hiphiman]

My impression with the WiiM Mini was that its optical output into the Mojo 2 gave a sound which was obviously superior to an iPhone/iPad attached using the camera connector, so I would definitely give that a try. Having said that, I use Amazon Music and the AM iOS app upscales everything itself before sending to the M2 whereas the WiiM should be a bit perfect source, so that might explain at least some of the difference.

 

[Mr Ee]

Try setting the digital out to match the capability of the DAC rather than matching the bit rate from Tidal

Edit. Use the test thing but it should be 24/192

Yep, I'd 2nd that. Don't set a restriction in the wiim app, let it pass through whatever it gets.

However..
I use tidal hifi, yet my dac in my headphone setup (from a bluesound node, mqa external dac option disabled) shows 88.2 for some tracks.

Strangely though, when I cast the exact same track to my wiim (in a different setup)it shows 44.1 in both the wiim home app and on that dac.
I have the mqa core decoder option enabled, and dac setting as no mqa support.

I shall have to try swapping the wiim and bluesound to see what each dac reports with the other source.

 

[onlyoneme]

Yep, I'd 2nd that. Don't set a restriction in the wiim app, let it pass through whatever it gets.

However..
I use tidal hifi, yet my dac in my headphone setup (from a bluesound node, mqa external dac option disabled) shows 88.2 for some tracks.

Strangely though, when I cast the exact same track to my wiim (in a different setup)it shows 44.1 in both the wiim home app and on that dac.
I have the mqa core decoder option enabled, and dac setting as no mqa support.

I shall have to try swapping the wiim and bluesound to see what each dac reports with the other source.

I think you cannot have 88.2 in HiFi subscription as it requires HiFi Plus.

 

[Mr Ee]

That's what I thought, but both my dacs report 88.2 for some tracks when cast to the bluesound.

 

[onlyoneme]

Files offered in HiFi are quite often MQA ones but with missing data required for unfolding. Maybe Bluesound upsamples them even without reconstruction possibility? No idea.

 

[d6jg]

The OP hasn't been back to comment but I think the combination of all pieces of advice should enable him to troubleshoot.

 

[onlyoneme]

Trying other cables and outputs is definitely one of the first steps to consider in the troubleshooting.

 

[JonnyH]

Hi folks,
thanks to all of you that responded to my post and my apologies for not responding sooner! Shortly after starting this thread I was hit by a bad case of flu and have only recently got back on my feet again. First of all I should say that I did reset my digital out to 24bit/192Khz and this made some improvement to the sound but still the detail compared to USB out from my iPad to mojo 2 still wasn’t there. I procrastinated for some time about replacing the coaxial cable linking the out of the Wiim pro to my Mojo 2 dac, but largely because the one I had been using was the one that came with my IBasso hi-res audio player-a short heavy duty cable terminated with gold plugs that appeared to be of high quality.. I was reluctant. Anyway I eventually decided that I’d try changing out the coaxial cable. Because I have a Chord mojo 2 dac, I needed a coaxial cable terminated with RCA at the Wiim end and 3.5 minijack at the mojo end. A bit of searching on the net led me to the conclusion that there wasn’t much available ready made with this configuration other than Chord company’s clearway coaxial cable at £90(ouch!). I know that in the world of Hifi this may not be that much, but given that I wasn’t even sure it would make much difference, it seemed a lot! The reviews of it were very positive. Anyway, I took the plunge and ordered the cable.I received it today and as you would expect from Chord, it appeared to be of good quality (if appearances mean anything..which clearly from my past experience informs me..it doesn’t !). Unfortunately the hard plastic insulation sleeve which extended round the RCA terminated end of the cable meant it wouldn’t fit into the recessed coax socket on the Wiim! I decided at this point to go ”all in” so to speak and use Stanley knife to carefully cut back 6mm of the plastic insulation round the RCA plug(rendering it unreturnable/unsalable)so that it would fit in the Wiim. This alteration completed and with some trepidation I plugged in and set up the Wiim pro with the new cable, press play and…it sounds GREAT! Real….wow..what a massive difference!
So any Mojo owners that want to connect the Wiim pro to mojo via coaxial (which is really the only way to utilise the full potential of streamer and Dac) be aware that although the Chord clearway cable sounds great, you will have to slightly modify it.
Thank you to all you folk who kindly took the time to try and help me sort out the issue I was having! Cheers J

 

[Mr Ee]

No way. It's just a cable. Confirmation bias. Just 0s and 1s. Done a blind a/b/x test?
It's more likely that the micrograms you shaved off altered the pro's harmonic resonance frequency.
(That should cover most of the responses.)

Glad you fixed it, nothing worse (well, there is, but...) than getting a new toy and it not quite performing like you want / expect.
Enjoy!

 

[eoseivissa]

Hi folks,
thanks to all of you that responded to my post and my apologies for not responding sooner! Shortly after starting this thread I was hit by a bad case of flu and have only recently got back on my feet again. First of all I should say that I did reset my digital out to 24bit/192Khz and this made some improvement to the sound but still the detail compared to USB out from my iPad to mojo 2 still wasn’t there. I procrastinated for some time about replacing the coaxial cable linking the out of the Wiim pro to my Mojo 2 dac, but largely because the one I had been using was the one that came with my IBasso hi-res audio player-a short heavy duty cable terminated with gold plugs that appeared to be of high quality.. I was reluctant. Anyway I eventually decided that I’d try changing out the coaxial cable. Because I have a Chord mojo 2 dac, I needed a coaxial cable terminated with RCA at the Wiim end and 3.5 minijack at the mojo end. A bit of searching on the net led me to the conclusion that there wasn’t much available ready made with this configuration other than Chord company’s clearway coaxial cable at £90(ouch!). I know that in the world of Hifi this may not be that much, but given that I wasn’t even sure it would make much difference, it seemed a lot! The reviews of it were very positive. Anyway, I took the plunge and ordered the cable.I received it today and as you would expect from Chord, it appeared to be of good quality (if appearances mean anything..which clearly from my past experience informs me..it doesn’t !). Unfortunately the hard plastic insulation sleeve which extended round the RCA terminated end of the cable meant it wouldn’t fit into the recessed coax socket on the Wiim! I decided at this point to go ”all in” so to speak and use Stanley knife to carefully cut back 6mm of the plastic insulation round the RCA plug(rendering it unreturnable/unsalable)so that it would fit in the Wiim. This alteration completed and with some trepidation I plugged in and set up the Wiim pro with the new cable, press play and…it sounds GREAT! Real….wow..what a massive difference!
So any Mojo owners that want to connect the Wiim pro to mojo via coaxial (which is really the only way to utilise the full potential of streamer and Dac) be aware that although the Chord clearway cable sounds great, you will have to slightly modify it.
Thank you to all you folk who kindly took the time to try and help me sort out the issue I was having! Cheers J

Hi JonnyH
I agree with you and feel totally in agreement with your original experience. I experience the same the same problem that you do. I connect my Wiim pro plus to the Mojo 2 through optical and ten sound is AVERAGE, ...but when I stream directly from the Amazon app in my android Itab commected to the Mojo2 thrugh USBc the quality is FAR, FAR SUPERIOR!!!!!
That drove me crazy and tried all kind of variarions (to the exception of coaxial which I am still tryng to define what is exacgly needed)....unril I norice something quiet puzzling ....The amazon app inbeded in the Wiim, offers a lower musical definition by as much as 2 levels to de same Amazon app in the tablet!!!!!...For example.....Karen Souza Velvet Vault collection inthe tablet is HD Atmos and i the Wiim only HD!!!!!!!
COULD THIS BE THE REASON?????.WHY IS THE AMAZON APP IN THE WIIM TO MUCH LOWER QUALITY THAN ELSEWHERE????
THAT ALSO APPLIE TO Spotify, Roon, Tidal etc????ANY COMMENTS?

 

[onlyoneme]

ANY COMMENTS?

Yes, shouting will not help.

 

[eoseivissa]

Yes, shouting will not help.

is that what you wife tells you?