WiiM Bar review: Can this soundbar debut compete with Sonos?

It hasn’t taken WiiM all that long to establish itself as a digital audio force to be reckoned with, and it doesn’t take much deductive power to work out why: compact, well-made, affordable products that perform to a standard in excess of the asking price, and a properly sorted ecosystem.

No wonder the company is feeling bold enough to expand into the spatial audio soundbar market. The Bar (and who wouldn’t have wanted to be at the marketing meeting when that model name was decided on?) is a first effort – but it wouldn’t be the only time WiiM has hit the bullseye at its first attempt...

Price & Availability

The WiiM Bar spatial audio soundbar is on sale now, and in the United Kingdom it’s priced at £449, while in the United States it sells for $479, and Australia gets it for AU$769.

Sonos may have moved its Beam soundbar upmarket with the launch of the Ultra, but that still leaves the WiiM to face down some very credible alternatives...

Features & What's New?

The WiiM Bar is configured to deliver an impression of 3.0.2-channel spatial audio. Obviously it uses an element of digital signal processing to achieve this, but it also deploys physical drivers pointing in a number of directions to create this sonic character.

So there are three 110 x 52mm ‘racetrack’ mid/bass drivers and three 52mm tweeters deployed across the front surface of the Bar – these take care of the left, right and centre channel information within the soundtrack.

On the top of the soundbar, out near the ends and positioned behind a little perforated section, are a couple of 52mm full-range drivers that are angled up and out in an effort to bring the required ‘height’ to the soundstage.

In an effort to give the sound a little more heft there are four 110 x 50mm passive radiators serving up some low-frequency presence – two face forwards, two face backwards.

These eight powered drivers get an all-in total of 135 watts of Class D amplification to deal with.

Physical inputs are all arranged in a little recess at the back of the chassis. There’s an Ethernet socket and an HDMI eARC input, naturally, and WiiM also provides a USB slot, a 3.5mm analogue input and a digital optical socket.

Wireless connectivity is handled by Bluetooth 5.4 (with SBC, AAC and LC3 codec compatibility) and by triple-band Wi-Fi 6 – which means the ‘Connect’ version of every popular streaming service, Google Cast, internet radio and most other online goodies are easily accessible. Odd, however, is the lack of AirPlay compatibility.

Performance

There’s really only one place to start with a spatial audio soundbar, and that’s with some spatial audio content. And with some Dolby Atmos-soundtracked stuff streaming from one of the world’s more popular services, the WiiM Bar wastes very little time in letting you know what it’s all about.

Fundamentally, that turns out to be punchily robust, impressively dynamic and remarkably positive sound. It’s far from unsubtle, and it's more than happy to ramp up the tension when the going gets especially quiet and creepy – but you somehow know it’s itching to get to the jump-scare, so that it can showcase its remarkable dynamic headroom and low-frequency control.

At the bottom of the frequency range the WiiM is solid, square-edged and weighty. Bass sounds don’t enjoy the same level of detail and variation as information higher up the frequency range, but if it’s a sturdy foundation you want – as well as the outright wallop some many movie soundtracks rely on – you’ve come to the right place.

The midrange projects well, is a sight more detailed than the bottom end, and exists in a nice little pocket of space that the Bar’s soundstaging abilities always earmark for dialogue.

At the top of the frequency range the WiiM attacks with crisp determination – but its treble presence is substantial rather than flimsy, so even during the biggest dynamic upheavals the top end never edges towards ‘hard’ or ‘glassy’.

Oh, and given that 135 watts of power in total is not, on paper, the most encouraging number, WiiM is to be congratulated for making the Bar so vaultingly and effortlessly dynamic. It never sounds stressed when dealing with big chances in volume or intensity and never alters its fundamental sonic character.

The tonal balance is pretty neutral, despite the fact that the lack of variation at the bottom end can make things sound a little warmer than they otherwise would. The control factor of the low-end is good, though, so rhythms in soundtracks (or when streaming music in straight stereo) are realistically expressed.

In fact, the Bar is one of the best pound-for-pound soundbars out there when it comes to music playback. Some of this is to do with the fact that you can enjoy true stereo, produced by just two of the tweeters and two of the mid/bass drivers, if that’s your preference when listening to stereo recordings.

Most soundbars insist on using all their drivers no matter if they’re playing two-channel content, and it’s seldom a good policy. Mostly, though, the quality of music playback is to do with the fact that the WiiM’s balance and direct nature makes for a spirited and engaging account of your music.

When listening to music mixed in Dolby Atmos, though, or to a movie with a spatial audio soundtrack, the WiiM Bar can’t quite hit the literal and metaphorical heights. For all of the space and careful organisation of its soundstaging, it never really manages to position sound up much beyond the top of your TV – even if you really got to town in the ‘height audio’ section of the control app, where a boost of up to 12dB is available for the height channels.

It’s the one rather tentative aspect of the bar’s performance, and it’s unfortunate that it should concern the aspect of performance that many listeners are going to be most preoccupied with.

Design & Usability

WiiM has always kept things neat and tidy where the design of its products is concerned, and at a usefully compact 74 x 1060 x 105mm (HxWxD) the Bar doesn’t look overgrown even when accompanying a TV as titchy as my 48in Philips OLED.

The standard of build and finish is well up to par, the gentle curves at either end of the chassis keep the look nice and friendly, and the main choice of finishes (matte white or the matte black of my review sample) make a bit more sense than the super-refelective gloss black that’s available as a limited edition in some territories.

When it comes to using the Bar, WiiM has supplied more options than are probably necessary. There are four little touch-surfaces on the top of the chassis, for example, which take care of ‘play/pause’, ‘volume up/down’ and input selection.

However, as is key to the design, there's also a 53mm circular display, bursting gently through the top of the soundbar. Here you can also action the same controls as above, and plenty more besides, by using the touch-screen – it puts you in charge of everything from EQ settings to accessing favourites, as well as offering visual confirmation of your actions.

There’s also a little aluminium remote control handset that is a cut above the norm in both look and feel. It covers all the fundamentals of operation, and has a 'mic’ button that can put you in touch with your Amazon Alexa voice assistant if you so desire.

Best of all, though, is the ‘WiiM Home’ control app that’s free for iOS and Android. The stable, logical and extensive nature of its app has been one of the (many) reasons WiiM has achieved this level of credibility in double-quick time – and here it’s just as useful and just as thorough as it is in every other implementation.

The app lets you integrate your favourite music streaming service(s), internet radio providers and what-have-you. It lets you build, quickly and easily, multi-channel and/or multi-room systems using other WiiM products – if you want your Bar to be accompanied by rear speakers and a subwoofer, it’s the work of a moment once you’ve powered them up.

The app's got a whole lot of sonic adjustability options in the form of both EQ and PEQ interfaces, height channel adjustment and so on, too. There’s even a very effective room correction EQ that uses your smartphone’s mic to help the soundbar calibrate itself to your specific environment.

So if it’s wide-ranging and granular control of the performance of your soundbar/speaker you’re after, and you want it from an interface that’s intuitive and rock-solid, don’t look any further.

Big, bold sound from a usefully compact and relatively affordable spatial audio soundbar? Numerous options when it comes to incorporating the soundbar in question into a multi-room or multi-channel system? A real facility with music and one of the very best control interfaces in the business?

All the above applies to the WiiM Bar, and it serves to carry it most of the way – if it could be as assertive where the ‘spatial’ aspect of 'spatial audio' was concerned, it could become a default choice. As it stands, though, it needs to be judged as a fine first effort and the sort of thing that committed WiiM owners will love in a multi-room setup.

Also Consider

The is the opposite of the WiiM Bar, at least when it comes to the control app experience. But get beyond that and the Heston 60 has plenty to recommend it, quite apart from its chunky and expansive sound - it has that Marshall aesthetic, for instance, and it can be used in two different orientations. It’s no slouch when it comes to music, either. But it can’t lay a glove on the WiiM experience when it comes to multi-channel or multi-room usage…