John Darko
With vinyl and CDs, we have the sleeve and the booklet — but what do we look at when we stream music? One answer is a screen on the front of the streaming device that shows cover art and metadata. But this begs another question: why put a screen on a streaming DAC or amplifier when a) the cover art is reduced to the size of a postage stamp and b) the artist name, album title and song title are too small to be read from the listening position?
I asked this out loud when WiiM’s Ultra and Amp/Pro stopped by for the review treatment and this month, WiiM has responded with a tvOS app called WiiM Home TV that puts ‘now playing’ information on the big screen. BYO TV and Apple TV.
Unlike the third-party TV:Remote tvOS app that I use to pipe Roon’s ‘now playing’ screen to the Apple TV and Samsung ‘The Frame’, WiiM Home TV is free of charge. Click once to install it and click again to launch it.
Upon startup, the Home TV app auto-discovers all WiiM streaming devices connected to the same data network as the Apple TV. In my case, that’s a Pro Plus and an Ultra.
I used the Apple TV’s silver remote wand to select the Ultra as the active device and kicked Monolake’s Gravity into life using the Roon Remote smartphone app. The cover art and metadata glowed on the Ultra’s touchscreen (as before), but now that info was also showing up on the Samsung TV. Neat!
Wait thirty seconds and the transport-and-volume controls disappear to show only the cover art, album title, song title and the WiiM logo in the upper right corner. This is close to the minimalist view I have configured for TV:Remote. It’s also not too dissimilar to Apple Music running on the Apple TV, but with one key difference: the absence of a non-bit-perfect HDMI ARC connection. Roon streams audio bit-perfectly to the Wiim Ultra, and the WiiM Home TV app ‘sees’ that stream and pipes the corresponding cover art and metadata out to the TV.
If you’re one step ahead of me, you’ll know that the WiiM Ultra also supports Tidal Connect, Spotify Connect, Google Cast and Apple AirPlay 2 (among others!). Would the WiiM Home TV app see an Apple Music stream sent to the Ultra using Google Cast? A Syd Barrett playlist tells us “yes”.
However, my attempt to listen to System 7’s Live Transmissions 02 by Google Casting Apple Music was aborted after three tracks. Google Cast had reminded me the hard way that its playback isn’t gapless: it still slices split-second gaps between tracks that cut over seamlessly on the CD, on Tidal Connect and via Roon.
A Patron recently asked why I used SoundCloud when the audio quality is so low. The answer is simple: SoundCloud hosts thousands of DJ mixes that aren’t available elsewhere. I pulled up Barker’s latest Resident Advisor DJ mix within the WiiM Home smartphone app’s own (somewhat basic) SoundCloud integration and watched as WiiM’s Home TV app took care of the ‘now playing’ information on the TV. Now that’s bloody marvellous.
Next up, Rob Zombie’s soundtrack for House of 1000 Corpses, this time streamed via Tidal Connect. Once again, I no longer have to squint at the Ultra’s touchscreen to see what’s playing. I can read it on the TV.
Testing Apple AirPlay 2 streams (which in most cases are lossy AAC 256kbps) and Spotify Connect streams falls to someone else but I suspect that anything played on any streaming-capable WiiM device will be auto-detected by the WiiM Home TV app and the associated metadata piped out to the TV over HDMI.
A quick look at the WiiM Home TV’s settings panel tells me I am using v1.0.2. And it’s obvious from the lack of spit-n-polish that WiiM still has work to do. For example, I couldn’t get the ‘queue’ page to show anything with any form of playback, even though the active album (or playlist) advanced track-by-track as expected.
Also: the Apple TV remote control wand’s transport buttons don’t do anything (yet). If we want to play/pause or previous/next using the WiiM Home TV app, we must use the Apple TV remote’s cursor keys to land on the desired virtual key and then ‘press’ it using the centre button. Right now, it’s easier to play/pause or previous/RHCP with a smartphone app. Note: volume changes can be communicated via HDMI ARC even when HDMI ARC isn’t used to feed the audio stream into the Ultra.
Whilst I am picking nits, I would like to see the animated three-bar ‘spectrum analyser’ go bye-bye because it’s visually distracting. I would also like to see the album title on the ‘now playing’ screen swapped out for the artist name. Why? Because when we hear an unknown song that we like, we ask, “Who is this?” long before we ask, “Which album is this from?” We want to know the artist name first, then the song title, and then maybe the release on which that song resides.
The chances that WiiM’s software development will execute these changes are high — if only because its track record with feature set adjustment and expansion shames most (if not all) other streaming hardware manufacturers.
Moreover, WiiM’s latest foray into tvOS app development further cements the idea that the future of ‘now playing’ screens lies not on the streaming devices themselves but on the TV that sits between (most of) our loudspeakers.
Further information: WiiM
