Life with the WiiM Pro - so far

So, it arrived, and I have it setup. (I don’t have the whole listening station re-setup yet, there are several requirements pending before I can do that. Sigh.)

The WiiM Pro and the Modius are both drawing power from the Anker 351’s built-in USB A ports. The Modius is of course hooked up to its AC/AC power brick. The WiiM Pro is connected to the home Ethernet via a GS105, and to the Modius via a short TOSlink cable. The Modius is feeding the Magnius via XLR connectors.

So far I’ve only really tried it out with the HIFIMAN HE400SE Stealth Magnets headphones pictured hanging off the UpLift headphones stand (Walnut sample block); they’re connected to the Magnius via Hart Audio’s HC-9: Dual 3.5mm headphone cable for Hifiman, Focal, Meze 109 / Liric headphones and more (Modular, Balanced Capable) × 1 Red / [M] 4-pin XLR cable kit.

There are parametric or 10-band EQs available, and you can save presets. Here, I have the oratory1990 Harman curve for the HE400se headphones dialed in (er, well, as best as my fat fingers and decades-old eyes could get it, on my first attempt):

I have the maximum output set to 48 KHz, 24-bit; the Modius should be able to handle more (192 KHz at 24-bit), but at least with my ~2 minutes of fiddling, this was the highest that worked over the S/PDIF cable I had handy. I doubt seriously my ears can tell a difference.

Streaming from free tier Pandora:

Streaming from Apple Music via Air Play 2:

It sounds amazing. I setup my free Pandora account in the app and it’s natively streaming 128 Kbps music there; if I connect to it as an Air Play 2 device from my iPhone, it’s getting a 256 Kbps stream. It also exposes a Bluetooth connection, so theoretically I should be able to connect it to my old Sony Walkman.

Connecting to my NAS, running Samba 4.19.4 (providing “SMB2” services), it connects using a username and password to my shares, using NTLMv2 authentication. authDescription is null, clientDomain is set to an empty string, as is workstation. Others have had some difficulty getting this to work, but I didn’t have to tweak anything. I connected to \\172.16.3.5\Music where that share is defined in /etc/samba/smb.conf as:

[Music]
        comment = Music
        path = /nas/media/Music
        valid users = @fileusers
        public = yes
        writable = yes
        printable = no
        create mask = 0775
        msdfs root = yes 

To get there, in the WiiM app, select the Browse section at the bottom of the screen, then tap Home Music Share under My Library. That will bring up a list of any Media Servers discovered on the local network, and any Shared Folders setup. Tap '...' in the upper-right corner and then Add Shared Folder in the menu that pops up. Then tap '⊕ Add Shared Folder' and provide the SMB share details. Pretty straightforward.

More as I play with this thing... But so far, I like it!