The future of entry-level amplifiers

In a recent video, I said that I didn’t see the utility of multi-room streaming for smaller apartments; that if I wanted to hear music while I was upstairs in my 80sqm one-bedroom duplex, I’d simply turn up the volume on whatever was playing downstairs. And yet the arrival of the WiiM AMP Ultra has made a liar out of me.

I didn’t want to tear down the high-end system I’d built in the lounge room – a pair of Vivid Kaya 45 floorstanders driven by a Marantz Model 10 and fed by a Grimm MU2 – to review the little WiiM. Besides, people might grumble that my acoustically treated room isn’t sufficiently ‘real-world’ (their words, not mine). I wondered if, with some careful storage redistribution, I could clear the shelves in my upstairs hallway to make way for a mid-century modern sideboard and a pair of standmount loudspeakers. Why the hallway? With hi-fi taking over most corners of my life, I have a rule: no hi-fi gear in the bedroom.

The result spoke for itself: a more modestly priced amplifier operating in a 3m x 4m space and – crucial to this story – untouched by physical acoustic treatments. I need only clap my hands to expose the room’s 750ms reverb time. That’s probably similar to the listening spaces used by the AMP Ultra’s target audience. Welcome back, ‘real world’.