Journey Into Madness: The WiiM Pro Plus & Our Household Sound System

With this post, we've now written three times about our never-ending journey towards building a high(ish)-end sound system in our house and on our back deck. While I don't know that we're necessarily done with this project, we're done for right now. Thus, this post serves as a cross between a write-up of lessons learned and an exorcism of the madness that's developed from starting to learn about this stuff in the first place.

From an early version of Sports Bar on the Back Deck.
We've come a LONG way from here.

If you missed the previous entries in this series, you can find them here:

• Journey Into Mystery: Building a Sound System on my Back Deck
• Twitter Threads: Sound Quality

We may well come back to this in the future, but for right now, I feel like I've maybe exhausted my wife's patience with this thing. Moreover, we've definitely hit a point of diminishing returns.

Setting Up Sound in Our Living Room

As previously noted, we started this project by considering the need for a subwoofer in my living room to round out the sound for our primary living room speakers, a pair of Edifier powered speakers (R1700BT) that I got from my employer in lieu of a gold watch on my 20th work anniversary. Bottom line: these are decent if relatively low-end speakers -- by the standards of audiophiles, at least -- whose only real problem is that they tend to come in a little heavy on the bass. In exploring this problem, I quickly realized that I definitely did not need a subwoofer to improve sound quality on these bad boys. 

However, I didn't exactly know what I did want when we started this quest, and as noted, things soon got out of hand.

I should note, too, that we previously had a simple, low-end Bose soundbar hooked into our living room TV via optical cable, and it's fine but totally lacking in bass -- not surprisingly -- and it's also not very loud. I therefore decided to hook the Edifier speakers into the TV alongside the soundbar both to improve overall volume and just as a way to make better, more consistent use of those better speakers.

Alas, this did not work particularly well. I connected the Edifiers via RCA cable and the sound bar via optical cable, resulting a slight speed differential and thus sound parallax that quickly became extremely annoying. A simple RCA splitter solved that problem, but it still left us with three separate remotes when watching TV. Plus, though the sound got louder, it wasn’t necessarily easier to understand TV dialogue owing to the heavy bass characteristics of our Edifier speakers.

Sigh.

It turns out that our TV has both an in-built volume leveling function — to ensure that dialogue and music have the same volumes — as well as a dialogue enhancement option. These things helped quite a but, but… Man, it still sounded heavy.

Enter the WiiM Pro Plus. We bought this thing as a high speed music streamer, but we soon discovered two things. First, since we have neither Amazon Music nor Tidal, we don’t actually have access to true high definition music. Second, this thing’s true best use case isn't in its streaming capabilities. It's WiiM's room correction functionality.

Not much to look at, but it's a nice piece of gear.

I plugged the WiiM into our TV’s optical cable. I then plugged the RCA splitter into the WiiM’s RCA audio out ports, and then, finally, we were back to having just one volume control for both sets of speakers plus remote for our TV. I then ran the WiiM’s room correction function, and suddenly our TV sounded… AMAZING. Like, night and day different. I’m honestly amazed by how clear it now sounds. The WiiM corrected for the Edifier’s base characteristic on a range-by-range basis (as measured in Hertz), and yeah. Wow.

You’re probably thinking that this is fine, but that it would obviously be better if the WiiM had a HDMI EArc connection, giving us just *one* remote for both TV and volume. That's true. But it’s also true that we’re using this thing as a receiver for two very different sets of powered speakers, at least one of which was decidedly not intended for this purpose. So yeah, the WiiM will automatically power on when it starts receiving an input signal, as will our Bose sound bar. However, those Edifiers definitely will not do that, making them the real weak link in this chain. They sound the best by far, especially once we ran the room correction, but they’re not “smart” in any way. 

Hell, the Edifiers don’t even have an optical input. They're RCA, Bluetooth, or bust. 

What can you do?

One solution would be WiiM’s $300 Ultra. Their $300 streaming amplifier hooked to a set of passive speakers would be even better. Both offer EArc connectivity, and if I’d approached this problem in anything like a linear fashion, I would almost certainly have solved it using the streaming amplifier connected to passive speakers. We still might get to that point someday. However, for now -- while attempting to make the best possible use of our existing equipment, such as it is -- this has been an entirely decent solution.

I should say, too, that Spotify Connect sounds quite good through this system when pushed on its maximum quality setting. We’re easily getting more than 300+ kbs which is then converted to analog via the WiiM’s super high-speed digital-to-analog conversion (DAC) algorithm. I have this set to a ridiculously high sample rate by default, but none of the services I’ve tried can make anything like full use of it. Alas. We may try Amazon Music’s subscription service at some point just to get the full effect, but for now, it’s been more than good enough. Besides, what we’re getting through Spotify is at least on par with what we’d get off our record player. Our CD collection might sound better were we to dig it out and somehow hook it into this thing, but man, that feels like inviting a whole new set of problems. 

Sports Bar on the Back Deck

On our back deck, we hook the WiiM into a Fosi Audio BT20A Pro amp to power a set of Polk Audio Atrium 5 Outdoor Speakers. The Atrium 5's are probably better speakers overall than our indoor Edifiers, but where the Edifiers lean a little heavy on the bass, the Atrium's lean a little light. We initially corrected for this by connecting our JBL Xtreme 2 Bluetooth speaker via the Fosi's sub-out aux port -- intended for a powered subwoofer but perfectly acceptable when firing to any powered speaker -- and this both added more bass and helped round out the sound profile on our back deck overall. The whole set-up sounds entirely decent when connected via Bluetooth straight through to the Fosi amp, but of course, running room correction via the WiiM outside makes it sound noticeably better. Happily, you can save those room corrections according where you're using the WiiM.

The back deck under the canopy

Polk Atrium 5 installed on the canopy. This probably did not maximize base.

We can then use the WiiM's Alexa functionality to add in the system in my wife's studio behind our back deck. That's just an old sound bar connected to an Echo Dot 3 via aux cable, but it's got a subwoofer, and it sounds okay. Hell, I'd have said it sounded good before we got into all this madness. Moreover, playing both systems together yields something like surround sound on the back deck. 

This was the goal.

We had some options for creating an interconnected WiFi sound system home-wide. Apple has the AirPlay system, Amazon has the Alexa/Echo system, and Google has a system that runs via Chromecast. WiiM devices can use any of these as well as their own system, which is a bit more flexible than the big three. We went with Alexa because we already had an old Echo speaker -- again, I got it through work several years ago -- and because buying an Echo Dot 3 looked a bit cheaper than buying the WiiM Mini would have been. Getting an old Dot 3 via E-Bay worked out to something like $40 all in. By comparison, the WiiM Mini retails for $89 plus tax. 

Given that we were gonna connect either one to an old sound bar and subwoofer combo, cheaper seemed better. But maybe the WiiM's room correction would've made sense in the studio if we'd given it a chance? 

I guess we'll never know.

Looking Forward

Alas, this project is done for now. My current obsession is getting on my family's nerves. They're ragging on me about it in a way that tells me that they're all ready to move on. It's also true that any next steps can get relatively expensive if not carefully managed. Sally will indulge me -- up to a point -- but I want to stop well short of vanity. 

I mean, this can get ridiculous. Let's don't go there.

With that said, there are still two areas of our the back yard where additional Alexa-enabled speakers might make sense. First, we've got a little shade garden with some Adirondack chairs under a tree out by our back fence, and currently there's no way to get sound out there besides carrying a Bluetooth speaker out there with you. My JBL Xtreme 2 works fine for this. However, we don't currently own an Alexa-enabled portable speaker, so whatever we listen to out there, it's disconnected from the house's overall speaker network. That's a First World problem to be sure, but it's one we can solve easily enough.

We've got two potential solutions. The easiest and generally the cheapest would be to get an Alexa-enable portable speaker, probably either a Sonos Roam or a Move 2. The other solution would be getting another set of Polk Atriums, permanently installing them on the outside of the studio facing the shade garden, and powering them with another small Fosi amp from the studio via the Echo Dot 3 that's already installed. We could get a set of Atrium 4's in an open box for about $100 via Amazon plus the new amp and still be price competitive with anything from Sonos. Add in an aux splitter from the Studio's Echo Dot 3, and we've now got sound everywhere. It plays to the shade garden when we turn that amplifier on.

The Sonos Move 2 is $450.

The other area where we could potentially add another speaker in the back yard is over by my grill. In this case, a portable Alexa speaker makes the most sense by far. However, we don't need this thing in any way. I can totally hear the back deck speakers from my grill. Here we'd just be rounding out the sound a bit. Plus, if we went with another set of Atriums outside the studio, that would absolutely also reach the grill.

Finally, I kind of want to put a set of speakers into our library. This would almost certainly be our extant powered Edifiers, meaning that I'd finally have a reason to buy some passive bookshelf speakers and the WiiM streaming amplifier for our living room, which would in turn launch whole 'nother round of this project. I very much doubt we'd get through that next round for less than $700 or so, and man, there's always something on which to spend $700. That's especially true given the goal of that project would be to use the WiiM system to expand our record player's reach.

I mean, really?

No one needs this thing. Like, at all.

The problem with all of this is that once you start, you can't unhear the difference in high quality sound. Also, did I mention that my neighbor now wants me to design a set of speakers he can build in his machine shop? 

I've only just realized how much sound engineering I'm going to have to learn to attempt this feat.

* * *

Anyway. Thank you for coming with me on my Journey Into Madness. Let me know if you found this at all interesting or useful. If you didn't, well, I'll probably figure that out on my own.