Hi-Fi: in praise of WiiM.

[laurentian]

Genuine question with no agenda. Can you tell the difference? I'm curious.

On occasion I (tell myself that I) can discern between my my normal rip of 256kbps variable bitrate MP3 and FLAC, or between Apple's normal quality and their Lossless, but personally I wouldn't bet my house on it. When I dived into MP3 in a big way around the y2k, I read about a double blind study that said the vast majority of folks could not tell the difference when listening on $10K worth of kit, between 256kbps constant bitrate and CD.

Even to my ever-aging ears, there's a marked difference especially when listening to Tidal "max" tracks

 

[T4tomo]

Some clever stuff about. I'm tight so pipe Alexa into my amp and stream through that, but a decent alternative might be in my future.

I have a very old ipad (that barely holds its charge, so its perma plugged into mains) running Spotify App, plugged via its headphone port into my analogue amp and thus into a big pair of floor speakers.

It works well and means anyone in the house can chose what to play without needing to use my phone etc.

 

[Drago]

Even to my ever-aging ears, there's a marked difference especially when listening to Tidal "max" tracks

Just when I think I can hear a difference I try again on different equipment then Im not so sure. Theoretically the ear/brain cant discriminate anything much beyond 50kbps, but then theres audio and signal compression and all sorts of other stuff that complicates that.

 

[FishFright]

Just when I think I can hear a difference I try again on different equipment then Im not so sure. Theoretically the ear/brain cant discriminate anything much beyond 50kbps, but then theres audio and signal compression and all sorts of other stuff that complicates that.

Are you sure about 50kbs ? That's too low for even an audio book

 

[Drago]

Are you sure about 50kbs ? That's too low for even an audio book

As aforementioned, its stuff like audio and data compression that compounds the issue,

In terms of pure audio information with no other influences about 50,000 discrete pieces of data a second is about the ear/brain limit.

 

[SpokeyDokey]

I have a very old ipad (that barely holds its charge, so its perma plugged into mains) running Spotify App, plugged via its headphone port into my analogue amp and thus into a big pair of floor speakers.

It works well and means anyone in the house can chose what to play without needing to use my phone etc.

I bought a Samsung tablet for about £140 in a sale specifically to use as my Spotify controller and nothing else.

Mrs SD hijacked it to play games on.

I have now reverted to using my phone, instead. 🤷‍♂️

 

[SpokeyDokey]

We have demoed the WiiM Sound and Sound Lite. The former has a small round touch screen on it that can be used as a controller. Not really needed as the WiiM phone App can control the speaker instead.

Sound is very good and it has a whole raft of clever features (similar to Sonos).

Link (select speakers from the Hamburger):

https://www.wiimhome.com/products/w...HYVEIMSxPwMMZrVawKZNiHbSqaJ99Y8_lJ3OYv6be9oBK

 

[FishFright]

As aforementioned, its stuff like audio and data compression that compounds the issue,

In terms of pure audio information with no other influences about 50,000 discrete pieces of data a second is about the ear/brain limit.

I mixed that up with 50kbs mp3 encoding which is unlistenable to