John Darko
Today, my three favourite hi-fi products of 2023. All three are Future-Fi contenders and they’re all super affordable in the broader context of high-end audio.
Please note: these aren’t the three ‘best’ hi-fi products of 2023. Ask yourself: how many standmount loudspeakers, for example, would you need to bring home to discover the ‘best’? And at what price point/s? How much work would that entail? Rinse and repeat for DACs, streamers, amplifiers, phono stages, turntables and you’d not get any sleep for a year.
No, what follows are my three favourites – the ones that I’ve enjoyed using the most during the review process…but also outside of it. Crucially, I will continue to use all three of these favourites well into 2024.
WiiM AMP
The first favourite of 2023 is the WiiM AMP, which I think represents a watershed moment for entry-level audiophiles. For $299 or €349, we get a 60wpc (into 8 Ohms) Class D amplifier to which we just add loudspeakers. Not only. Because the WiiM AMP does streaming. ALL. THE. STREAMING: Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, Apple AirPlay 2, Google Chromecast, Roon Ready (eventually), AirPlay Cast and, confirmed with WiiM this week, Squeezelite. The WiiM AMP can be deployed as a Squeezebox.
Moreover, the WiiM Home streaming app that integrates Amazon Music HD and Qobuz is nicely-refined for a product of this price. It’s easily as comprehensive and intuitive to use as BluOS. And that comprehensiveness extends to subwoofer controls that not only allow us to specify the crossover point but also the sub’s gain and polarity. And yes, the WiiM AMP high pass filters the loudspeaker outputs when a subwoofer is added – that’s super useful if you’re running a 2-way loudspeaker (as I often am).
The supplied Bluetooth LE remote control allows us to connect the AMP’s playback to Amazon Alexa for voice control but if you want to use the AMP with headphones, those headphones will need to be Bluetooth. There is no wired headphone socket on the AMP.
Did I mention that the WiiM AMP also has an HDMI ARC input for hooking up to a TV? That’s super useful for normies: people unlike you and me who think that TOSLINK is outdated; or weird; or both. Or maybe it’s us who are outdated and weird? I digress.
The WiiM amplifier’s sound quality is fine for the price but its inclination towards the lean and lit up means that it’s bested by the lusher sound of more expensive models from Marantz and Audiolab. But those more expensive models cannot match the WiiM AMP’s extremely broad streaming functionality and its subwoofer integration smarts. And those more expensive models don’t sell for US$299 as the WiiM AMP does.
That WiiM has pulled all of this off with an aluminium chassis that wouldn’t look out of place on an amplifier selling for three times as much is, quite frankly, astonishing.
FiiO R7
2023 was the year that we could finally get our hot hands on streaming DACs equipped with touchscreens and an Android OS for under $1000. That software/hardware combination is killer because it allows us to play lossless and hi-res lossless streams from Apple Music. It also allows us to offline those streams and if the manufacturer has worked some custom code into the OS, Apple Music will play bit-perfectly.
Moreover, Android OS and a touchscreen means we can install and run Plexamp without any Raspberry Pi setup hassle. Mark my words, Plexamp is going to be big in 2024.
The majority of hi-fi world love for touchscreen-Android DACs went to the Eversolo DMP-A6 this year but I thought it sounded a little too keen in the treble, especially when conducting a side-by-side comparisons with the FiiO R7 driven by its PL50 linear power supply – together they sell for the same price as the Eversolo: €859. The R7 on its own goes for €699 and it more or less matches the Eversolo on back panel connectivity whilst adding a 3-Watt THX-certified headphone amplifier to the front.
It would be remiss of me not to mention that the R7 doesn’t have the DMP-A6’s VU meter display, CD playback functionality or NVME drive bay. On the latter, the FiiO has the next best thing: an SD card slot on the rear. And I think it’s worth pointing out that swapping out an SD card on the FiiO is much easier than swapping out a solid state drive on the Eversolo where we have to unplug the unit and deal wiith a screw.
If you want to know more about how the two units compare, you’ll have to watch my Eversolo review video. Alternatively, you can read John Grandberg’s take on the Eversolo here. Or my initial FiiO video coverage here.
Many months after making that video, I still have reservations about the utility of the DMP-A6’s landscape-oriented screen and how it displays apps primarily designed for a smartphone’s portrait mode. The star of the R7 show for me is its portrait screen that combines with an Android OS to give us an Apple Music UX that’s pretty much identical to a smartphone’s. If you’ve used Apple Music, you’ve used it on the FiiO R7. For me, that makes it more intuitive in day-to-day use.
Such everyday UX satisfaction holds greater sway with me than the remote control ‘Cast’ app offered by Eversolo, which the FiiO doesn’t have. But if the DMP-A6 is intended for hi-fi racks and sideboards where we sit here and it ‘over there’ with couch control to coming from a smartphone app, we have to cheekily ask: why does the DMP-A6 need a touchscreen at all?
The FiiO can go anywhere. Literally. It’s small enough that I’ve taken mine in hand luggage to Portugal and back. I’ve set it on a low board to fire into a loudspeaker system and I’ve used it on a deskop with headphones. The R7 isn’t as refined-sounding as the RME ADI-2 DAC FS that it replaced in my office but it’s far more fun / intuituve to use.
Is the FiiO R7 a desktop DAP on steroids or a streaming DAC? I think it’s both.
Shanling ET3
Lastly, something that we reviewed very recently: the Shanling ET3 CD transport, which is so much more than that. The ET3 has a front panel display that shows us track progress – as we’d expect – but that porthole display also shows us cover art and metadata arriving over AirPlay or UPnP. Yup: this CD transport also contains a basic network streamer. For me, that’s a big plus.
The bonuses don’t end there: the ET3 has an internal upsampler that goes all the way up to DSD512 — if we use its I2S or USB output, DSD64 if we don’t. As well as the more standard AES, coaxial and TOSLINK digital outputs, the Shanling gives us USB and I2S. If there’s a standalone DAC on the planet that cannot be connected to this Shanling, I’ve not seen it.
However, I think my favourite feature of the ET3 is a CD mechanism that doesn’t rely on a slot or a drawer. It’s a top loader with a ‘saucepan lid’ cover. The puck that keeps the CD in place sits on the underside of that glass cover. Lifting off the lid, placing the CD into the cavity and then putting the lid back on top means we have to get very hands-on with a physical format — the Shanling helps retain much of the playback ritual that many people love about vinyl.
As we know, CDs are considerably cheaper than records. Look at Peter Gabriel’s i/o or New Order’s re-issued Substance: the CD version gives us bonus material not found on the vinyl. Similarly, The Cure’s 2023 reissue of Wish spread the original 12 tracks across two slabs of vinyl but for the CD version, two extra discs of bonus material were added.
Judging by the number of new CD player models announced in the past couple of years, hifi manufacturers have woken up to how audiophiles are a long way from giving up on the silver disc. And I am delighted to see Shanling put its CD transport out there with more features than the competition and for considerably less money.
So there we have it: my three favourite hi-fi products of 2023. All of them sell for under $1000 and all of them come from Chinese manufacturers. If you are determined to continue living in a household free from Chinese-made equipment (as many Darko.Audio YouTube commenters claim to be) then none of today’s award winners are for you. For the rest of us, I don’t think there has been a better time than now to get into audio on a budget.
