Completely Blown Away--Geshelli JNOG3 with SparkoS Dual SS2590 Op-amps
Ed, I tried all that with the Ultra, yet the MXN10 still renders cleaner, crisper, and more transparent sound. The edges of high and low notes are more well-defined with the CA streamer. The Ultra's rich feature set and its 20% sale tempted me to pull the trigger, but these band-aids won’t fix its fundamental weaknesses. Nevertheless, maybe people actually prefer that kind of sound. |
@lanx0003 your room is probably in much less need of correction than mine. With 4- and 6-year-old kids, I don’t have the luxury of a special listening room or even speaker placement, so room correction is my only option to get the sound as I want. I also do not know how you tried to utilize the room correction in the WiiM—it takes proper setup. Tune the bass management first as good as it will get, then limit room correction from the subwoofer crossover point up to 500Hz max, and then switch off bass management temporarily to run left vs right room correction (a feature that only came out a week ago or so—and this feature is absolutely key if your listening setup is not symmetrically placed in the room, such as in my situation), then run it, and I don’t use the crappy iPhone microphone, I use a MiniDSP UMIK to do it. The final result is several levels better than any other thing I have ever done on this system. -Ed |
@lanx0003 room treatment again not an option with the kids. Point is that farther down the line (a few years from now), the entire system will find a final place somewhere more ideal in my home, so blowing a ton of money on room treatments for a temporary room placement is pretty wasteful. The software room correction is a generally zero-cost bonus feature (UMIK cost not included). -Ed |
Just to clarify the point about over-correction: In my living room, the PEQ corrections were kept within ±4dB, which corresponds to a ±32% change in the perceived sound level. Beyond this range, I would consider the adjustment to be an over-correction. The actual measurements were fairly close to the predicted results. However, even with this, the Wiim still sounds noticeably softer. I can tell you’ve spent a significant amount of time and effort pursuing a good DAC. With the enhanced Geshelli, I believe you could achieve much better results with a more refined streamer. I’ve been in a similar situation, and I can confidently say that the quality disparity between streamers is often more pronounced than that of DACs. Recently, I picked up a $170 SMSL D6s and found its sound quality to be nearly indistinguishable from the $1,400 Gustard R26. However, the difference between the $270 Wiim Ultra and the $399 MXN10 is easily noticeable. Here’s a suggestion: Since the Wiim Ultra has both line-in and Toslink inputs, try connecting it to the analog line-out or Toslink output of a better streamer. This way, you can take advantage of the streaming quality while still using the PEQ/RC features of the Wiim. It’s a win-win.
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