WiiM into Outboard DAC

I do suggest some sort of decent outboard DAC for the WIIM streamers. I found the native DAC circuit in the WIIM I bought and then returned to sound less than the Cambridge Audio I ended up with. I had purchased the Pro Ultra.

Does anyone else find the sound quality of the digital output of the pro, highly damped, like a towel thrown over the music? That’s what I hear, and another friend has made the same observation independently. I’m quite surprised at this performance… But I don’t see very many people mentioning this.

It may depend on the engineering of the outboard DAC.

A great DAC, with good FIFO, isolation of the input(s) to reduce noise, and a top quality clock (OCXO) is effectively insensitive to the source (given reasonable competence of the source).

In the early days of digital, DACs were very sensitive to their source as they reconstructed the  clock from the input stream and had poor isolation, so different CD transports and different digital cables seriously affected the DAC's sound. Jitter was a major problem. In my experience today's better DACs do not have that issue.

One thing to look at is the device's output capabilities and the DAC's input specs.  There may be limitations on DSD inputs for example.  My Esoteric DAC only supports DSD 512 over USB.

There may be differences in the streamer's noise rejection from the input CAT-5/6 - look for reviews on that topic.

if you’re using ONLY the digital outs into an external DAC, there’s basically no real sonic difference between WiiM Pro and Pro Plus, and only a maybe, sorta, tiny one with Ultra via USB. Any changes are going to be way smaller than what your DAC/room/speakers are already doing.