Whoever says streaming is easy is telling porky pies. On it being gapless, it turns out that our Patron is only half correct. He’d obviously missed my intro post on the same. One Darko.Audio Patron excitedly messaged me over the weekend about how I simply had to check out this “new gapless $99 streamer”. Whilst we’re entertaining the devil and his details, let’s talk about gapless playback and how it relates to the Mini. Fire up any MQA stream and try to push it over to the Mini using Tidal Connect and a CD-quality stream will land in its place. The gotcha (or Schadenfreude) will be the Mini’s absence of MQA support. I am talking about The Cure’s Disintegration. Once that industrial-Brit-techno had run its course, I moved over to Tidal to hear the greatest album of the 1980s - in CD quality via Tidal’s Connect service.
I was up and running with a Spotify Connect stream of Perc’s Wicker & Steel within three minutes of unboxing. The speed and simplicity of this puck’s wi-fi onboarding process should have some high-end streaming hardware manufacturers rethinking theirs. The Mini then uses those credentials to connect to our wifi network. We give the app our wi-fi’s login credentials and it injects them into the Mini (over the air). The app auto-detects the Mini and scans for nearby wi-fi networks.
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For onboarding, we need to install the Wiim Home smartphone app (iOS, Android). We gotta go BYO.Īlso missing in action is an Ethernet port. Following modern smartphone supply trends that aim to cut back on potential landfill, no power brick comes in the box. The latter is used to juice the Mini with 5V. A generous complement of cables is provided: 3.5mm to 3.5mm analogue, 3.5mm to twin RCA analogue, TOSLINK and USB-A to USB-C.
Wiim also seems to care about getting users up and running out of the box. Unboxing the Mini tells us that Wiim cares about preventing in-transit damage to the unit’s touch-sensitive top panel: it’s protected by a foam pad that’s secured by a removable sticky film. In this written review, I will go deeper on the Wiim Mini than is possible from a YouTube video. Amazon’s 30-day return policy would insure me against gotchas – of which there are at least two – should I wish to return the unit. The Mini’s small form factor – it measures 7cm across – and its surprisingly broad feature set, all sat next to its €99 asking, made it an easy buy. Last week’s introduction to the Mini came by way of a reader tip-off. And no, the New Year didn’t prompt its manufacturer to take their six-month-old streaming device on a fresh promotional outing. It isn’t new but it’s new to me: the Mini’s listing tells us that it launched last October.
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The Wiim Mini is a puck-shaped Bluetooth and network streamer supporting Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, Apple AirPlay 2 and UPnP.
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