Wimp Hifi went on the air today, 01. october. We had a test drive.

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The price for Wimp Hifi is 199, - NOK pr. month, that is 100% more expensive than the main version. At the moment it is not available for those with subscription via Canal Digital.

Having oredered  trial account on Wimp Hifi, you have to change some settings in the setup menu to activate Hifi. This is done separately for streaming and offline playing.

Currently, Wimp Hifi is only available via iOS and Android, plus Sonos and Bluesound. They are working with access also via PC and Mac. Flac will be the main file format for streaming, but the IOS receivers (iPod / iPhone / iPad) Apple's proprietary format  ALAC is used. To Dagbladet Wimp said that almost the entire catalog is ready converted to FLAC while it still remains quite a lot of ALAC.

I just tried IOS devices in my test round, an iPhone 4S and an iPad 3 The stream was directed to a Linn Akurate DS via Airplay. I experienced no capacity problem in the form of drop outs, etc.

My test drive confirmed that there probably is a clear minority of the publications that are available on Hifi yet. It provides a clear indicator in the form of a True logo lights up now the selected album in lossless quality.

Wimp has also created a special playlist as a sort of demo of what is achievable in lossless quality. A lot of good music with great sound. Not surprisingly, we find a good number of tracks from 2L.

Sound quality of the lossless files are of course just as variable as what we are used to from CDs. It is also not possible for me to notice any difference in sound from the Wimp Hifi and sound from the corresponding music that is stored on the hard drive and streamed locally. Conversely, I long ago got used to the sound I get when streaming lossless 44.1/16 difficult to be achieved fully from a disk-based players.

The Wimp Hifi is a huge advance for streaming - there is no reason to doubt. On our facebook page we commented news from the Wimp "A narrow step for Wimp, a giant leap for hi-fi streaming" . In retrospect, I realize that "a narrow step" might be a little disrespectful to the great efforts Wimp has closed, but it was well intended. It is not possible for most hifi enthusiasts to steer away from Wimp Hifi after this. However, we might want to hurry to change it to lossless streaming in general, it will astonish me if not big brother Spotify and others will follow closely.

It is time to take on the philosophical lenses in such moments. Some will - and maybe even already have - frowned upon doubling of the price. It is in my view completely unfounded. One can wonder that Spotify and Wimp to now partially given away for free streaming, and whatever has taken low payment for fullprice menbers. It's probably said that there has been a streamers market vs record companies - an imbalance that has led to some companies have refused to participate. It is very unfortunate that especially the narrow artists are harmed in the streaming regime.

With the doubling of the price of Wimp Hifi, Wimp claim that 75-80 % of the increase goes to the record companies. It is tempting to assume that this will provide a much better basis for the small artists. It is also reasonable to assume that there might be a relevant policy for those just offering music hifi your subscription, or whatever it will be called by competing service providers. This is a good situation for both parties, especially for us who do not choose music exclusively by VG-list.

Congratulations to Wimp and to audiophile music lovers. This is an ever so small paradigm shift. In the meantime, we look forward to the next, where high-resolution multichannel music is available as streaming.