WiiM Mini Review

Design

• Smart and tiny chassis
• Capacitive touch controls on top
• Solid ports for the size

The WiiM Mini can be looked at in two ways in my book – either as an Amazon Echo Dot sans smart speaker powers, or as a stylish hockey puck. Whichever your chosen interpretation, it’s a smart and dinky piece of kit.

It sits at just 69mm in diameter and 24mm high, making it one of the smallest streamers of its kind, and it isn’t particularly obtuse in terms of looks either. The glossy top panel is home to volume and play controls for media, which may attract some fingerprints and grubbiness, so you’re best keeping your hands clean when tapping away.

Around the side of the WiiM Mini is where you’ll find its port selection. Owing to the size, there isn’t much for more advanced users, but folks wanting a more basic, plug-and-play solution to smarten their hi-fi will be happy. You get a 3.5mm input, a 3.5mm output, a Toslink optical output and a USB-C for power.

A neat little trick for you – that USB-C port is the usual 5V/1A, and this streamer can happily sip power from a standard USB-C phone charger, or even a power bank. 

If you’ve got some active speakers that don’t have any streaming powers (and have a USB-C port for charging a phone or similar) and you want to do some desktop listening, then you can hook up the WiiM Mini to USB-C for power and one of the audio outputs into the speakers, and you’ve got a discreet and unified setup that adds streaming smarts to a set of active speakers without much additional bulk.

The WiiM Mini doesn’t come with a remote control in its equally tiny box, but the on-board touch controls are enough alongside the WiiM Home app (more on that later). There is also an LED indicator to show the status of the unit, while WiiM also provides a USB-C to USB-A power cable, a 3.5mm to RCA cable and an optical cable in the box if you don’t already have them.

Features

• Solid file support
• Extensive streaming services and more
• Excellent app feature set

The WiiM Mini maintains feature parity in a lot of respects with the brand’s pricier streamers, such as the WiiM Pro or the WiiM Ultra. This means support for up to PCM audio up to 24-bit/192KHz with extensive file format support – MP3, AAC, ALAC, APE, FLAC, WAV, WMA, AIFF, and OGG are all included. DSD files can’t be played, as it’s the only WiiM streamer in the line-up that can’t natively play natively or convert them to PCM.

Inside, this streamer features a Texas Instruments PCM5121 DAC with a THD+N (Total Harmonic Distortion + Noise) figure of 0.0025%, which means that signal noise is incredibly low and near imperceptible.

The streamer supports AirPlay 2, DLNA, Spotify Connect, TIDAL Connect, Amazon Music casting, Qplay 2.0, and Bluetooth 5.0. The big omission is Google Cast, which is a step up to the WiiM Pro. You also get Qobuz, TuneIn internet radio, Napster, iHeartRadio and more in the excellent WiiM Home app. 

This is one of the only WiiM streamers to support any form of native playback with Apple devices, as the other options in the brand’s lineup noticeably go without AirPlay 2 support. It doesn’t get Roon Ready support, so Roon users will be left to use AirPlay instead 

Voice assistant support isn’t baked in, but there is ‘Works with’ compatibility when connected to a mobile device that does support either Siri or Amazon Alexa, allowing for voice control over music selection, playback, volume, and other functions.

In spite of the WiiM Mini being such an affordable streamer, the fact that it shares a lot of its smarts with dearer products in the WiiM line-up is fantastic. A large part of that is how easy the WiiM Home app is to use and how much you can do with it. Setup for the streamer is easy, with it taking no more than a few minutes for it to be ‘seen’ by my network, a firmware update installed, and all the rest of it. 

Once inside, you get easy access to switching inputs and outputs, plus a range of services, as mentioned above, and even more besides that I haven’t mentioned. This includes the ability to punch in an open network stream for internet radio and native Plex integration.

If you’ve got a media server set up and are using Plex for hosting videos and music, this is a biggie, as WiiM is one of the only manufacturers with native Plex support baked into its app; you’d otherwise have to use Google Cast from a phone.

Delving deeper into WiiM Home reveals support for a parametric EQ (along with an array of genre-specific presets) and RoomFit room correction. This works in a similar way to Sonos’ TruePlay, although it works on both Android and iOS, and alters the frequency response of the WiiM Mini to suit the room you’ve got it in.

Obviously, there’s more to just sound than the room you’re in, but having a helping hand to optimise such an affordable piece of kit is a pleasant gateway to more serious listening.

Performance

• Cohesive and organised soundstage
• Solid low-end strength and texture
• Forward vocals, although top end lacks a bit of bite

I elected to test the WiiM Mini with kit that isn’t as overkill as some other folks and items that are more in the realm of a ‘mid-range’ system. That means a set of Q Acoustics Concept 30 speakers on the brand’s FS75 stands, and with a Marantz integrated amplifier.

Technically, the Marantz has streaming powers of its own accord, so the humble WiiM streamer was connected via RCA line-in to the MCR-60n to get a flavour of how the Mini performs with its own DAC.

I was struck by how composed the WiiM Mini’s sound was for something this size and this cheap. It isn’t going to match the width or depth of pricier streamers, but for a device that costs as little as it does, there’s a believable and coherent sound here rather than anything flat or one-dimensional.

The soundstage is perfectly believable when spinning up a live cut of George Benson’s Affirmation, and while it isn’t the widest or most three-dimensional, there’s still plenty of breathing room allowed for the reverb of the crowd reactions in the song’s opening seconds before the band gets into the groove.

Moving over to the Dark-Side Mix of Peter Gabriel’s Road To Joy allows the Mini to show off some solid low-end, with decent texture and detail retrieval on the song’s pounding bassline. Okay, it isn’t going to give the utmost in detail retrieval, either here or with James Taylor’s October Road, but the Mini isn’t half putting on a good show for a smooth listen that’s on the warmer side and easy on the ears.

That James Taylor track also allows the Mini to show off its direct vocal portrayal, with his warm baritone sitting front and centre in the mix, while the drum shuffle and acoustic guitar work built around him have some good detail and texture to them.

Spinning up Steven Wilson’s Luminol is a tricky test for any piece of equipment, especially with its brisk introduction that features everything from a pounding bassline to erratic flute and lots of harsh cymbal work. The Mini provides a lovely sense of cohesion and organisation for these elements, although I felt the top end lacked a certain bite and attack, feeling a little smoothed over compared to how the internal DAC in the Marantz handled it.

Should you buy it?