Every time I write a comparison of the WiiM Ultra and the Pro Plus, I recommend the Ultra to the people who want a screen and the Pro Plus to everyone else, and everyone else is most people. So this is the long version for everyone else: what the WiiM Pro Plus actually is after a year running in my living room, what it does better than boxes costing five times as much, and the handful of things you give up to save the money.
The short story is that the Pro Plus is the streamer I stop recommending other streamers over. It costs around $220, it sounds clean and quiet, it supports every streaming protocol worth having including the one the Ultra drops, and it disappears into a system the way good source components should. It is not flashy. It is just right.
What It Is
The Pro Plus is a streaming preamplifier. It brings modern streaming to whatever amplifier or powered speakers you already own: Spotify Connect, AirPlay 2, Chromecast, Tidal Connect, Amazon Music, Qobuz, DLNA, and Roon Ready are all onboard. You connect it to a power amp, an integrated amp, or a pair of active speakers, it converts the digital signal to analog with a good DAC, and it hands you a preamp’s worth of volume and input switching. It is not a speaker and it is not a power amp, so if you have neither, you want the WiiM Amp Pro instead, which is essentially this same brain with 60 watts per channel built in.
What the Pro Plus is not is a fashion object. There is no screen, no aluminum slab, no touchscreen. It is a small black puck that sits behind your gear and does its job, and the entire budget went into the parts that make sound rather than the parts that make an unboxing video. I respect that, and after a year I have never once wished it were prettier.
The DAC Is Better Than the Price Suggests
At the center is an AKM AK4493SEQ, a well-regarded DAC chip that WiiM pairs with a cleaner power supply than the plain Pro had. AKM versus ESS is an audiophile debate I am not going to relitigate, but the practical result is that the Pro Plus sounds clean, quiet, and honest. The noise floor is low enough that on quiet recordings you hear the space around the notes rather than a haze behind them, and that is the single most convincing thing a source component can do at this price.
The Pro Plus does not editorialize. It is not a warm, syrupy DAC that flatters bad recordings, and it is not a clinical one that punishes them either. It plays what is on the file and gets out of the way, which is exactly what I want from a source, because the character in my system should come from the speakers and the room, not from a streamer imposing a flavor on everything. Feed it a hi-res file and it resolves detail cleanly. Feed it a compressed Spotify stream and it plays that honestly too. It is a genuinely good DAC that happens to live inside a $220 box, and it is the reason the Pro Plus won What Hi-Fi?’s budget streamer award two years running.
Room Correction Is the Sleeper Feature
This is the part people skip right past in the spec sheet and then cannot live without once they use it. The WiiM app includes automatic room correction, a 10-band graphic EQ, a full parametric EQ, and a stack of preset curves, and all of it runs on the Pro Plus, not just the flagship. You run a measurement sweep with your phone microphone, the app builds a correction filter, and it applies it to the output.
Room correction is not magic. It cannot fix reflections or reverb, because those are physics, not signal, and no software will turn a bright, echoey room into a treated studio. What it does extremely well is flatten the bass modes below a couple hundred Hz that make one seat boomy and the next seat thin. In my living room the correction pulled down a fat low-frequency hump that had been muddying every bass line, and the gain in clarity was larger than any component swap I have made at this price. Being able to then add a parametric filter by hand for a stubborn peak the auto pass missed is control you normally pay a dedicated processor to get.
One honest caveat, the same one that applies to the Ultra: the DSP is applied during the digital-to-analog conversion, so room correction and EQ affect the analog outputs. If you run the Pro Plus’s optical or coax output into a separate external DAC, you are asking for a bit-perfect passthrough and the correction has nowhere to live in that path. For the overwhelming majority of buyers using the Pro Plus’s own DAC, this never comes up. If you bought it specifically to feed a fancier outboard DAC, know that you give up the room correction that is one of the best reasons to own it.
The Inputs Matter More Than You Think
The Pro Plus is not input-only. Alongside the optical, coax, and analog outputs, it has an optical input and an analog input, which means it is not just a one-way streaming source. You can loop in a TV over optical and run the audio through the Pro Plus to your real speakers, or connect a turntable that already has its own phono stage through the analog in. It quietly turns the Pro Plus into a small hub rather than a dongle.
This is where the honest gap with the Ultra shows up, and I want to be clear about it. The Pro Plus does not have HDMI ARC, so it cannot take your TV over HDMI the way the Ultra can, only over optical, which works but does not pass the newest surround formats. It does not have a built-in phono preamp, so a turntable needs its own phono stage first. And it has no headphone jack. If any of those three things is central to your setup, that is your reason to spend the extra hundred dollars on the Ultra. If none of them is, you are paying for features you will not use.
The Feature the Ultra Gives Up: AirPlay 2
Here is the twist that surprises people, and it is the single best argument for the cheaper box. The Pro Plus supports AirPlay 2. The flagship Ultra does not.
If you live in an Apple household and rely on AirPlay 2 multi-room grouping, controlling this device from iOS Control Center alongside HomePods or other AirPlay speakers, the Pro Plus can do it and the Ultra cannot. That is not a firmware gap that will be patched, it is a hardware and licensing matter, so it is permanent. I have watched people order the Ultra for its nicer DAC and screen, discover on day one that it will not join their AirPlay group, and send it back. The Pro Plus never has that problem. For a lot of iPhone-centric homes, AirPlay 2 alone makes the Pro Plus not just the cheaper choice but the correct one.
Home Assistant and the Local Angle
Because this is a jpk.io review, the local-control question matters. The Pro Plus shows up in Home Assistant through the official WiiM integration as a media_player entity, so you get local play, pause, volume, and source control on your own hub with no cloud account for the smart-home side. It slots into automations the same way the rest of my multi-room audio setup does, so a morning routine can start music on it, or a doorbell automation can duck its volume. It also works beautifully in Music Assistant for whole-home audio, grouping with other players for synchronized playback across the house.
The streaming services themselves are cloud, obviously, so this is not a fully offline device. But the control surface is local, which is more than most streamers in this class offer, and it is why WiiM hardware keeps showing up in my life-after-Sonos writeups.
Who Should Buy It
Buy the Pro Plus if you want the best streaming box for the money with no fuss, if you rely on AirPlay 2, if you are adding a streamer to an amp or powered speakers you already like, or if budget is a real consideration and you would rather put the saved hundred dollars toward better speakers, which is almost always the smarter place for it to go.
Buy the Ultra instead if you specifically want a touchscreen on the device, a built-in phono stage for a turntable, HDMI ARC for your TV, or a headphone jack, and you do not need AirPlay 2. Buy the Amp Pro if you have no amplifier at all and want an all-in-one for passive speakers.
The Bottom Line
The WiiM Pro Plus is the streamer I recommend more than any other, and after a year in my living room I understand exactly why it keeps winning budget awards. The DAC is genuinely good, the room correction is worth the price of admission on its own, the input flexibility makes it a small hub rather than a dongle, and it keeps AirPlay 2 that the flagship drops. You give up a screen, HDMI ARC, and an onboard phono stage, and if you do not need those, you are getting ninety percent of the Ultra for two-thirds of the money. For most people I talk to, that is not a compromise. That is just the right call.