I have written about the WiiM Ultra versus the Pro Plus before, and every time I recommend the Ultra to someone in a roundup I end up writing three sentences that really want to be three paragraphs. So this is the long version: what the WiiM Ultra actually is after a year on my main desk, everything it quietly replaced, and the one omission that will send a specific kind of buyer to a different box.
The short story is that the Ultra is not really a streamer. It is a streamer, a DAC, a phono preamp, a headphone amp, a room-correction preamp, and an HDMI ARC audio input that happen to share one chassis and one very good app. At around $329 it does the job of a stack that would have cost four figures a few years ago, and it does most of those jobs well enough that I stopped missing the separate boxes.
What It Is
The Ultra is a streaming preamplifier. It brings every modern streaming protocol worth having (Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, Chromecast, Amazon Music, Qobuz, DLNA, Roon Ready) to whatever amplifier or powered speakers you already own, converts the digital signal to analog with a high-end DAC, and gives you a preamp’s worth of volume and input switching on top. You connect it to a power amp, an integrated amp, or active speakers. It is not a speaker and it is not a power amp, so if you have neither, you want the WiiM Amp Ultra instead, which is this same brain with 100 watts per channel bolted on.
What separates the Ultra from WiiM’s cheaper boxes is the hardware WiiM chose to spend money on: a better DAC, a color touchscreen, and a genuinely useful set of physical inputs. Let me take each one the way I actually use it.
The DAC Is the Real Upgrade
At the center is an ESS ES9038 Q2M, a SABRE DAC chip you normally meet in components costing three to five times as much. WiiM quotes a THD+N of -116dB and a signal-to-noise ratio of 121dB on the line output, and unlike a lot of spec-sheet bravado, this one you can hear as an absence. The background is black. On quiet acoustic recordings and well-mastered jazz, notes emerge from and decay into real silence rather than a faint haze of noise, and that sense of a low noise floor is the single most convincing thing about the Ultra’s sound.
Resolution on hi-res material is the other payoff. Feed it a 24-bit/192kHz file over the network and the Ultra pulls apart dense, layered mixes with a composure that my old midrange streamer-DAC combo could not match. It is not a warm or editorializing DAC. It plays what is on the recording, cleanly, and gets out of the way. If you want a DAC with a strong tonal personality, this is not it, and I mean that as a compliment. The character in my system comes from the speakers and the room, and the Ultra just delivers the signal to them intact.
There is also a TPA6120A2 headphone amplifier feeding the front headphone jack. It is not a giant dedicated desktop amp and it will not fully drive a pair of 300-ohm planars to their limits, but for the IEMs and easy-to-drive cans most people own, it is clean, quiet, and completely usable. It is the kind of feature you did not buy the box for and then use constantly.
The Touchscreen Changes How You Use It
The 3.5-inch color touchscreen sounds like a gimmick right up until you live with it. WiiM’s cheaper streamers are screenless, which means every interaction runs through your phone. The Ultra puts album art, track info, playback controls, and volume on the device itself, and it turns out that seeing what is playing without fishing your phone out of your pocket is one of those small quality-of-life wins that makes a component feel finished.
I use it most for the things that are annoying on a phone: nudging volume, seeing at a glance what a shuffle just served me, and swapping inputs when I move from streaming to the turntable. The onboard menus are shallow (this is a companion to the app, not a replacement for it) and I would not try to browse my whole library on a 3.5-inch panel. But for at-a-glance status and quick control, it earns its place on the desk. The unit itself is a genuinely handsome small slab of aluminum and glass that looks like an audio component rather than a networking accessory, which the screenless boxes never quite pull off.
Room Correction and EQ Are the Sleeper Feature
This is the part I did not expect to care about and now would not give up. The WiiM app includes automatic room correction, a 10-band graphic EQ, a full parametric EQ, and a stack of preset EQ curves. You run a measurement sweep with your phone microphone, the app builds a correction filter, and it applies it to the output.
Room correction software cannot fix everything. It will not tame a reverberant hallway or turn a bad room into a good one, because reflections and reverb are physics, not signal. What it does extremely well is flatten the bass resonances below a couple hundred Hz that make one seat boomy and the next seat thin. In my room the correction pulled down a fat 60Hz mode that had been coloring every kick drum and bass line, and the improvement in clarity was bigger than any component swap I have made at this price. Being able to dial in a parametric filter by hand on top of that, for a stubborn peak the auto pass missed, is the kind of control you usually pay a dedicated processor for.
One honest caveat that trips people up: the DSP, including room correction and EQ, is applied inside the Ultra during the digital-to-analog conversion, so it affects the analog outputs (the RCA line out and the headphone jack). If you run the Ultra’s digital output into a separate external DAC, you are asking for a bit-perfect passthrough and the room correction has nowhere to live in that path. For the vast majority of buyers using the Ultra’s own excellent DAC, this is a non-issue. If you bought it specifically to feed a fancier outboard DAC, know that you are giving up the room correction that is one of the best reasons to own it.
The Inputs Are Why It Ate My Rack
The back panel is where the Ultra quietly justified retiring three other boxes.
- Phono input. There is a built-in phono stage, so my turntable connects directly with no separate preamp. It is a competent moving-magnet stage, not an audiophile cost-no-object phono preamp, but for the vast majority of turntables and cartridges it is genuinely good and it removed a box and a set of cables from my setup.
- HDMI ARC. Plug the TV in over HDMI ARC and the TV’s audio runs through the Ultra’s DAC and out to your real speakers. This single feature is why the Ultra ended up in a living room and not just on a listening desk. It means one set of good speakers serves both music and TV, and the TV audio benefits from the same DAC and room correction as everything else.
- Line and optical inputs, plus a subwoofer output. The sub output has its own crossover, level, and delay settings in the app, which makes building a 2.1 system (a pair of bookshelves plus a sub) about as painless as it gets. If you have been meaning to add a subwoofer to powered speakers, the Ultra does the bass management for you.
Add it up. A streamer, a DAC, a phono preamp, a headphone amp, an HDMI audio input, and a subwoofer crossover, in one box, for $329. That is the actual value proposition, and it is why the rack behind my system got noticeably emptier.
The One Thing That Will Send You Elsewhere
I have to say this loudly because it is the single most important fact about the Ultra and it trips up buyers constantly: the WiiM Ultra does not support AirPlay 2.
The cheaper Pro Plus does. The Ultra does not. If you live in an Apple household and rely on AirPlay 2 multi-room grouping, controlling this device alongside HomePods or other AirPlay speakers from iOS Control Center, the Ultra simply cannot participate. There is no firmware update coming to fix it, because it is a hardware and licensing matter, not a software gap. It supports Chromecast for grouping and it works beautifully in WiiM’s own multi-room ecosystem and in Music Assistant for whole-home audio, but AirPlay 2 specifically is off the table.
So the buying decision is almost binary. If AirPlay 2 grouping is load-bearing in your home, buy the WiiM Pro Plus instead and accept the older DAC and no screen. If you do not use AirPlay 2, or you are happy to group over Chromecast and WiiM’s own system, the Ultra is the better box in every other respect and it is not close. I do not use AirPlay 2 grouping, so for me it was never a factor, but I have watched people order the Ultra, discover the omission, and return it, and that is entirely avoidable if you check first.
Home Assistant and the Local Angle
Because this is a jpk.io review, the local-control question matters. The Ultra 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, which means a morning routine can start music on it or a fire alert can duck its volume. It is not a fully offline device (the streaming services themselves are cloud, obviously) but the control surface is local, which is more than most streamers in this class offer.
Who Should Buy It
Buy the Ultra if you want one component to anchor a real two-channel system: you have an amp or powered speakers, you want an excellent DAC, you would use the touchscreen and the room correction, and maybe you have a turntable or want your TV audio to run through your stereo. It is the best value in a streaming preamp I know of, and the feature density is genuinely a little absurd for the money.
Do not buy it if you depend on AirPlay 2, in which case the Pro Plus is your box, or if you have no amplifier at all, in which case the WiiM Amp Ultra with its built-in power amp is the smarter one-box buy.
The Bottom Line
The WiiM Ultra is the most versatile audio component I can point you at for $329, and after a year on my desk it has replaced a streamer, an outboard DAC, a phono preamp, and a headphone amp while adding room correction I now consider essential. The DAC is genuinely excellent, the touchscreen is more useful than it has any right to be, and the input flexibility is what let it colonize both my desk and my living room. The only real catch is the missing AirPlay 2, and it is a big enough catch that you should decide whether you need it before anything else. Settle that one question, and if the answer is no, the Ultra is an easy and enthusiastic recommendation.