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And indeed, the slight losses of grip and tacitness with the DAC (actually my laptop) disappeared with the music server. To invoke woolen curtains parting way would be excessive but things did get a tad clearer and locked in harder. Now it sounded virtually identical with the ECM2. Perhaps the combo of Audiodata and Electrocompaniet DAC was an iota fresher and female vocals a tick more open. This was countered by the network player’s higher contrast. But now I was down to splitting not the atom but hairs and tastes. In essence I had two identical digital sources also on price. The set of Audiodata Server, USB cable and Norwegian DAC gets as much as the ECM2 networker. It simply won’t do DSD or video. For some real-world housekeeping, the delta of sonic advances which the Electrocompaniet ECM2 offered over a more affordable setup of notebook plus ECD2 was comparable to what a €4’000 DAC gets you over one for half the coin. Usually the costlier converter won’t sound twice as good, not even as much better as twice-priced speakers or amps get over their counterparts… but still better. Whether that degree of improvement warrants the outlay is, as always, up to the individual. So much about the foundation qualities of the review loaner and how it compared to its stablemate DAC. Now we get to the perhaps most exciting novelty of this streamer. Electrocompaniet has bundled it with the fresh WiMP streaming service also from Norway.

Listeners outside WiMP’s first markets (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Poland) might instead have heard of this streaming subscription service as TIDAL because it’s under that subsidiary branding that WiMP was set to enter the UK and the US at about press time. Norway’s WiMP is similar to Spotify on basic concept but differs by offering lossless file quality. Here it better mirrors the French Qobuz which Electrocompaniet plans to integrate by the end of 2014.
Via the virtual keyboard, searches are a few key clicks away.
A WiMP subscription in Germany is €20 a month for access to about 25’000’000 songs. That figure is far in excess of most private collections. Obviously there’s still music one won’t find on WiMP but their catalogue contains a lot more than just radio-ready mainstream Pop. For fun I searched for some off-kilter indie fare with plenty of success. If you want avantgarde, try Helmut Lachenmann. Whilst one would assume that nobody streams his stuff, here one finds more than 20 titles. I was impressed. Actually I was shocked. Music has never been this affordable. Unless one outright stole it. Which often was the case. It’s likely why the record industry seems thankful now for this latest streaming trend under the motto, better earn less than nothing at all. Listeners insistent on physical media obviously aren’t served unless they use such services as a sort of luxurious pre-sample listening outlet. If such folks avoid a single misjudged LP buy per month, WiMP would have already paid for itself.
25 millions songs at your finger tips at full CD resolution? Indeed. Nothing wimpy about it.
Those meanwhile who musically live primarily off downloads and rips are bound to embrace streaming subscriptions. Or do you find that streaming your own files from your own hard disk is far preferable to the nebulous cloud whilst forcing you to buy into the whole exciting batch of ripping, meta-data and backup maintenance? I’m not sure. Of course audiophiles want to first know how it sounds. Now we’re back to the ECM2 which quickly shuttles between WiMP/TIDAL and other streaming sources for contrast.

I was briefly confused when the same tracks (WiMP versus the ECM2’s own drive) would display with dissimilar kilo-bit-per-second kbps figures. The offset was up to 20kbps, mostly narrower for WiMP but occasionally also for the local file. This could have simply been caused by different FLAC coding. As far as I know, that format offers 9 different compression ratios. The higher the zipping level, the longer it takes to unzip files whilst their storage requirements shrink. Regardless, all FLAC versions are lossless. No matter, I couldn’t hear whether the music originated with the internal hard drive or rained down from the cloud. Just a bit better (minimally more resolved, better incarnated and dimensionally larger) than internal drive and WiMP I thought was streaming with the Musikserver MS I. But that was no discredit to WiMP, rather a credit to the Audiodata team. What’s more, that now was hardcore audiophile bean counting of the worst kind. Essentially it was all the same for pure sound. WiMP’s only small handling handicap is that the previously praised ultra-fast search function of the ECM2 doesn’t apply. These data mountains are simply far too Himalayan to be locally indexed. Hence any search query is first sent to WiMP’s server where it rummages for a few seconds before results manifest. That’s made up for by access to 25’000’000 songs which you won’t have to rip or otherwise manage. The current catalogue of music videos is set to grow as well. And didn’t I say that the Electrocompaniet does video too? You betcha.