The perfect hi-fi streamer exists only in our imagination – here’s how it looks

OK, so Dr Victor Frankenstein’s stitching together of various parts to create a new species for the betterment of humankind didn’t go so well, but what could possibly go wrong with mashing together the best bits of several music streamers to produce a perfect one?

We can heartily recommend as many as 15 hi-fi streamers to readers looking to make their systems streaming-savvy, all of which can be found in our best music streamer buying guide. But among the many talents of each are slight imperfections, or at least an aspect of their performance, design or feature set that is beaten by another's.

Indeed, the perfect hi-fi streamer only exists in our minds, so we’ve had some fun by selecting only the finest ingredients from our favourites to make the ultimate music streamer recipe – one that could surely only ever scare in how monstrously good it is!

Build quality: Eversolo DMP-A6

If you haven’t heard of, or don’t know much about, Eversolo, your first impressions of the Chinese-based manufacturer will likely be very positive after reading this article. Despite being relatively new to the music streamer market, it features more than once here, with several of the DMP-A6’s ingredients making it into our ideal music streamer recipe.

We reviewed the DMP-A6 18 months ago and were highly impressed with the package, whose solid foundation starts with its build quality. Despite being a pretty affordable machine at £759 / $859 / AU$1399, it proves it can play with the established big boys on both construction and aesthetic fronts.

For one, our test experts liked the shoebox size of its aluminium chassis, which is somewhere between the full-width design of the Cambridge Audio CXN (V2) and the half-width form of the Cyrus 40 ST. Those pretty compact dimensions strike a nice balance of fitting into any hi-fi rack both width- and depth-wise and being large enough to accommodate the size of LCD touchscreen you genuinely want to interact with (which we’ll get to shortly).

It's well-made and we like how its brushed aluminium finish, single dial and fascia-hogging display combine for a classy, minimal aesthetic. Music streamers aren’t inherently the most physically attractive hi-fi components – their app-heavy nature means they don’t really need to be – but Eversolo’s efforts here pay off. It’s little wonder the company has stuck to the same blueprint for its new DMP-A6 Gen 2.

Ease of set-up: WiiM Pro Plus

WiiM is another Chinese brand to have made a huge impact on the music streamer market, with its What Hi-Fi? Award-winning Pro Plus demonstrating that you can get decent sound, features and usability from a unit as affordable as £219 / $219 / AU$339. Pretty much everything about WiiM’s disruptor is fantastic for the price (bar its plasticky, non-descript build), but the part we like most for our streamer paragon is its set-up process.

The WiiM Home App is its crowning glory, facilitating an intuitive and fuss-free set-up that takes no time at all, is essentially foolproof, and is representative of how comprehensive and slick it is for daily operation.

As we said in our five-star WiiM Pro Plus review, the app is “a cut or two above what you might be expecting from such a modestly priced product (and even better than the apps accompanying rival products with more hi-fi pedigree)”.

User experience: Eversolo DMP-A6

We haven’t encountered any music streamer that betters the Eversolo DMP-A6’s user experience. While it starts with a fuss-free set-up that rivals WiiM’s (in a matter of minutes, our reviews team had hopped onto our network, accessed our various NAS units and logged into our Tidal streaming account – no problem), it’s the unit’s everyday user experience that sets it apart. “An absolute joy to use,” reads our DMP-A6 review.

Unusually for a dedicated hi-fi product, its wonderfully crisp full-colour 6-inch touchscreen display works as well as any current smartphone: it’s smooth, responsive and stutter-free, with neat graphics that are informative without looking cluttered. It is all powered by Android 11 software running on a capable quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 processor; the result is impressively slick. It’s so good, in fact, that we often found ourselves operating the Eversolo from its front panel rather than waiting for our iPad to boot up – and there aren’t many streamers we’ve come across at all that we actually want to directly interact with that way.

Features & app control: Eversolo DMP-A6

Of course, unless your hi-fi system is set up within easy reaching distance, right in front of you or by your side, remote control via a dedicated app on a phone or tablet is how you’ll most often interact with a music streamer. The third and final aspect of Eversolo’s DMP-A6 that we’re borrowing for our ideal music streamer creation is indeed its app.

Available for both iOS and Android, EverSolo Control is intuitive and logically arranged. Streamers are inherently complicated components that have a great deal of functionality, but somehow Eversolo has managed to make its app easy to navigate, even for those not comfortable with such things.

Perhaps most importantly, the app proves stable and reliable in use. In our time with the DMP-A6, it never drops out or freezes, which is almost unheard of. Both the product and the app just work, and that’s something the rest of the streaming industry would do well to emulate.

And while there’s greater parity in terms of streaming features in the hi-fi streamer market than ever before, the DMP-A6 remains, to borrow a quote from our review, “as feature-packed a streamer as we’ve encountered”. You can tick the usual boxes – UPnP, AirPlay 2 and support for popular music streaming services such as Tidal Connect and Spotify Connect, Qobuz, Deezer, Amazon Music and internet radio. It’s Roon Ready certified and has Bluetooth 5.0 (with aptX HD codec). It even has Chromecast built-in (less of a given than the others), while its proprietary sampling-rate audio engine means you can download the Apple Music Android app and stream its lossless hi-res catalogue without Apple’s famously closed ecosystem being a barrier.

Detail resolution & dynamics: Cyrus 40 ST

There are so many different aspects to sound performance that we often find ourselves wishing that even the best all-round hi-fi performers had a little bit more of this or a larger helping of that. For example, while one component may prioritise space and scale and the coherence that often comes with that, another may not be quite so open but instead have the compelling rhythmic flow of a ribbon gymnast.

It makes sense, then, that we have chosen the sonic highlights of three music streamers that, blended together, would create a flawless audio presentation. And it should probably come as no surprise that we have picked fairly premium propositions here. While feature count, app design, set-up ease and, to a lesser extent, build quality aren’t all that price-dependent in the music streamer market, sound performance is.

The Cyrus 40 ST (£2995 / $3995 / AU$4999) would in our minds be the best contributor of detail resolution and dynamic subtlety, getting one over on its biggest rival, the Audiolab 9000N, which won our What Hi-Fi? Award last year (and which features below). Our reviews team notes how in comparison it finds an extra layer of textural detail in instruments and voices.

“Dynamically, it is impressively expressive,” reads the 40 ST review, “rendering low-level shifts in intensity elegantly, and delivering large-scale orchestral crescendos with real conviction, leaving the Audiolab sounding a little subdued in comparison.” It’s as clear and precise a performer as we’ve come across at this aspirational level.

Rhythmic drive & punch: Naim ND5 XS

While the Cyrus is far, far from a musical slouch, arguably only one of its competitors can just better its rhythmic drive and outright punch. The Naim ND5 XS2 (£2499 / $3399 / AU$5750) brings the company’s long-held musical understanding very much to the fore, able to get right underneath any genre of music to convey not only the ebb and flow of its rhythmic pattern but also its intensity.

“It remains a pleasant surprise when a streamer displays any kind of aptitude for timing, but the clock here is admirably precise, while an abundance of punch and terrific dynamic range make for an entertaining, exciting listen,” reads our ND5 XS2 review. Combine the Cyrus’s class-leading analysis and the Naim’s effortless melodiousness and you have renditions that are as informative as they are enjoyable. But there’s another sonic aspect we want to throw into the mix too…

Tonal balance & soundstaging: Audiolab 9000N

Our current Award winner can still reply to the Cyrus and Naim when it comes to tonality and soundstaging, though. Compared to its rivals’ more condensed soundstage, the Audiolab 9000N (£2499 / $3499 / AU$5499) delivers an expansive sonic canvas that is big on both scale and space. It’s stable and packed with sharply focused and precisely plotted instruments and sounds, deftly organised so that its presentation is clean and coherent, never muddled.

It doesn’t even flirt with putting its own sonic character on the music, too, going straight down the tonal middle to offer impressive neutrality.

Both are familiar strengths (neither can be overstated) of Audiolab, which has impressed at the more modest end of the streamer market for years and whose latest 9000N shows it is just as adept at the more sophisticated end too.

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