The Best Music Streamer of 2025

The WiiM Pro Plus is the best network music streamer because it offers easy setup, reliable performance, and a wide variety of features—without commanding an audiophile price. It has enough inputs and outputs to integrate into most home-audio setups, and both audiophiles and casual music fans are likely to appreciate its functionality.

Setting it up is a breeze. Easy setup wasn’t the norm for these audio streamers, as many of them, especially those priced under $100, had trouble connecting—and staying connected—to their apps. But the WiiM Home app (available on iOS and Android) connected to the Pro Plus within 30 seconds, no need for troubleshooting. If for some reason the app has difficulty finding your device, it provides troubleshooting instructions during the setup process. Additionally, if you have spotty or unreliable Wi-Fi, the Pro Plus has an Ethernet port for you to directly connect it to your router.

The app then walks you through the process of connecting to the WiiM voice remote (for which you need two AAA batteries), measuring audio path latency, and integrating smart-home voice control. Each of these steps took about a minute in my tests, so the total setup time for the WiiM Pro Plus took about five minutes max.

If you plan on using the Pro Plus with your smart-home ecosystem, I recommend setting it up during the initial process within the WiiM Home app. Adding it afterward through Alexa Skills proved to be more time-consuming than just doing it when WiiM’s app prompted me to. If you’re using Siri, you can add the Pro Plus only through the Home app on iOS.

This streamer is intuitive and feature-rich. The Pro Plus has touch controls on the front face, and it comes with a remote (many other models we tested did not). But you need to use the companion app to get the most in-depth control and feedback, and its user-friendly design makes controlling the Pro Plus foolproof.

The home screen tells you what track is playing, which physical output it’s using, and the resolution at which it’s playing, depending on which source you’re streaming from. From the same screen you can also access controls for play/pause and track skip/reverse, as well as adjust the volume.

The app makes it easy to customize the way you listen. If you’re not using a separate device to EQ the sound, the app offers 24 presets, an adjustable graphic and parametric EQ feature that you can assign to your input source of choice, and automatic room correction using a supplied microphone. You can also control things like volume balance between channels and max resolution for each output.

You can also set a timer for standby mode, add a different remote, turn the touch controls on and off, or override the volume buttons.

It’s compatible with most music streaming services—but not Apple Music. In our test group, the Pro Plus had the highest number of integrated services, including Amazon Music, Deezer, Napster, Pandora, Qobuz, SoundCloud, Spotify, and Tidal. If you like to listen to radio broadcasts, the Pro Plus also integrates BBC Radio, Calm Radio, iHeart Radio, Open Network Stream, Radio Paradise, TuneIn, and vTuner.

You can create up to 12 playlists from these integrated services, though you can access only the first four from the remote. Toggling between playlists did produce some delay for me, but this likely happened because I was using different services in my tests.

None of the streamers I tested supported Apple Music directly within their apps, but all of them support AirPlay to transmit music wirelessly from your iOS or Mac device. The Pro Plus goes even further and adds support for Chromecast and Bluetooth, which are less common on other streamers.

It has all the input/output connections you need, and it can handle high-res audio. Because the Pro Plus has a bunch of input and output connections, it fits easily into most home-audio setups. It has optical and coaxial digital outputs, plus an analog stereo out. Unlike many other streamers we tested, this one also has analog and optical digital inputs to connect devices such as a TV, record player, or CD player.

You can change each output’s max resolution within the settings menu. Both the digital and analog outputs can play tunes at a max resolution of 24 bit/192 kHz. The streamer’s AKM AK4493SEQ digital-to-analog converter is technically able to decode files up to 32 bit/768 kHz, but the streamer supports output only up to 24/192. This difference in decoding versus output wasn’t an abnormality among the music streamers we tested; since they’re meant to work in a multiroom audio system, the lower output-resolution level curbs the possibility of audio breaks or lagging between speakers.

I created high-res playlists from Qobuz and Tidal, and I played a few high-res files through Roon to confirm that the WiiM Pro Plus didn’t choke on them.

The “browse” screen in the app is where you can access files stored on a home music server, such as a DLNA or NAS drive. As for file formats, the Pro Plus can handle AAC, AIFF, ALAC, APE, FLAC, MP3, OGG, WAV, and WMA.

It gives you several ways to create a multiroom audio system. There’s no one perfect way to stream audio all throughout your house, but WiiM offers several ways to create a multiroom setup that’s relatively painless to use. First, the Pro Plus is Roon-ready; you can add multiple devices to your Roon server and stream music to all of them at the same time.

You can also create a multiroom-audio setup using multiple Pro Plus streamers (or other WiiM devices). In our testing, we found that almost all of these affordable music streamers rely on the same Linkplay app interface, so you could connect them all to one other within the app to set up a multiroom system. On the home screen, you’ll find a little chain-link or plus-sign icon in the top-right corner; once you’ve added your devices to the control app, you just tap the icon to chain them together.

Finally, the Pro Plus’s smart-home compatibility also makes multiroom audio a reality. You can link the Pro Plus with your Alexa speakers, Google Home speakers, or Apple HomePod. I was able to add the Pro Plus to my Echo Show 8 and Echo pretty easily. I set up a speaker group called “party time” and played a cacophony of ear-piercing dubstep music that made cleaning my home more tolerable.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The WiiM Home app can be sluggish when you’re switching sources. If you switch from, say, your laptop to your phone or from the analog output to the digital output, you sometimes need to hit the play/pause button in the app more than once for it to work. I often found that the functionality was marginally better on Android than on iOS.

It has no USB port to attach a thumb drive. This omission doesn’t matter to everyone, but if you prefer to keep a bunch of songs stored on a thumb drive, know that you can’t plug that drive directly into the Pro Plus. You can, however, insert it into a laptop and stream the music to the Pro Plus.

It’s bulky. The Pro Plus isn’t as big as other models we tested, but it isn’t compact either, measuring 1.75 by 5.5 by 5.5 inches (HWD).