Spend more, get more. That is how a product line is supposed to work, and for most of this comparison it does. Then you find the one place it does not: the cheaper WiiM streams AirPlay 2 and the expensive one has never done it, on any production firmware. That single gap decides this purchase for a lot of people before any of the sound quality talk starts, and almost nobody mentions it until after the box is open.
The WiiM Ultra costs $329. The WiiM Pro Plus costs $219. For that $110 you get a 3.5-inch touchscreen, a phono input, HDMI ARC, a headphone output, a subwoofer output, a 12V trigger, Wi-Fi 6, and room correction. It is a lot of hardware for the money, and it is why I bought one.
You also lose AirPlay 2.
WiiM’s own spec sheet lists Spotify Connect, TIDAL Connect, Google Cast, Roon Ready, DLNA, and Alexa for the Ultra. AirPlay 2 is not on that list, and it is on the Pro Plus list. This is not a firmware update anyone is waiting on. The Ultra has never had it.
If your household sends music to speakers by hitting the AirPlay icon on an iPhone, that is the whole decision. Everything below matters less than that one line.
Take AirPlay off the table for a moment, because for a lot of people it genuinely does not matter, and the rest of the comparison is lopsided in the Ultra’s favor.
The phono input is the sleeper feature. A moving-magnet phono stage is a $100 box on its own, minimum, and the Ultra has one built in. If you own a turntable without a built-in preamp, the Ultra just absorbed a component. My Rega Planar 3 does not need it, but plenty of decks do.
HDMI ARC turns it into a TV audio hub. The TV’s audio goes into the Ultra over one cable and out to your amplifier. That is a second box absorbed, and it is the feature that lets a two-channel system quietly become the household system without anyone complaining about the remote.
Room correction is the one that changes the sound. The Ultra runs correction with independent left and right channels. This is the cheapest genuine room correction in hi-fi right now, and room correction is the single highest-value thing most systems are missing. I have written at length about why measuring your room beats buying more gear, and having it built into a $329 streamer is remarkable. It is not Dirac Live, and it does not pretend to be, but it is real and it is included.
The screen is better than it sounds on paper. I was ready to call the touchscreen a gimmick. It is not. Album art and a working VU meter mean the streamer stops being an invisible box you control entirely through a phone. Small thing, daily payoff.
The Ultra runs an ESS ES9038 Q2M. The Pro Plus runs an AKM AK4493SEQ. Both top out at 24-bit/192kHz for streaming. You will see 384kHz and DSD512 quoted for the Ultra in various places; WiiM’s own specification page says 192kHz/24-bit, and I would trust the manufacturer over the aggregators.
Both measure well past the point where the DAC is your system’s limitation. The Ultra’s line output is quoted at 121 dB SNR, the Pro Plus at 120 dB. That is not a difference you will hear in a room with a noise floor.
Here is the part worth saying plainly, because it cuts against spending more: if you are feeding an external DAC, the DAC chip inside either unit is irrelevant. You are using the digital output. The Pro Plus does optical and coax out, the Ultra does optical, coax, and USB. Buy on features and outputs, not on the chip.
It is smaller, it is $110 cheaper, and it does AirPlay 2. That is a shorter list, but it is not a weak one.
The Pro Plus is the right answer if you already own a DAC you like, you want a streaming front end and nothing else, and you want it to disappear into the rack. It is Roon Ready, it does Chromecast, TIDAL Connect, and Spotify Connect, and it has a line input with a Burr-Brown PCM1861 ADC if you need to digitize something.
There is also an argument I find genuinely persuasive: buy the Pro Plus, spend the $110 difference on your room instead. A UMIK-1 measurement microphone costs $79 and will teach you more about why your system sounds the way it does than any streamer upgrade at this price.
The Ultra is the better product and I do not regret buying one. It is not the better buy for everyone, and the reason has nothing to do with sound quality. WiiM built a more capable streamer and left out a protocol that half of Apple-owning households use every day. If you are one of them, the cheaper box is the right box, and that is a strange sentence to write about a product line that otherwise makes so much sense.
If you want to see how the Ultra holds up against competitors rather than its own siblings, I have compared it to the Eversolo DMP-A6 and to the Cambridge Audio CXN.
The Node costs $749, the Node Icon $1199, the WiiM Ultra $329. I own the Ultra. Here is what Bluesound's extra money actually buys, where the WiiM closes the gap, and who should still pay up.
The Eversolo DMP-A6 costs more than twice the WiiM Ultra. Here is how they compare on sound, features, build, and value, from someone who runs the WiiM daily.
The Cambridge CXN v2 costs roughly 3x the WiiM Ultra. Here's how they actually compare on sound, features, and value, and who should save the money.