Volumio Motivo Review | Trusted Reviews

Verdict

The Motivo isn’t perfect but the core offering is very good, delivering solid performance via an attractive and interesting piece of industrial design that is very enjoyable to use.

Introduction

When you are setting out to make a high performance audio streamer, the absolutely critical element of their specification is the software interface. It doesn’t matter if the product itself sounds like a choir of angels if using it is hellish. 

Volumio arrives in this field with a bit of a head start over the competition because, well before the company went anywhere near making its own hardware, it was a streaming interface you could install on the hardware of your choice. 

In recent years, Volumio has been building a small amount of dedicated hardware to accompany the software and the Motivo is by far the most ambitious of these devices. It’s designed to be a multi-function streaming front end that can be controlled and used in a variety of ways. 

There is no shortage of competition though, many of which also have a more than reasonable handle on the interface. Is the Motivo any good and do you need one in your life?

Availability 

The Motivo’s retail channels are a little different to most rivals and can be fractionally confusing. The easiest way to secure one in the UK (and indeed in Europe) is to order one direct from Volumio. 

This will cost you €1499 and this does mean that the price will wobble a bit depending on the exchange rate (at the time of typing this, just before launch on the 10^th July 2024, it would be £1266.11) but generally hovers around £1260. 

In the USA, the Volumio is listed at $1,849 and again seems to have a direct sales model. This is a fixed rather than an ‘on the day’ price though. There is no sign of a listed Australian dollar price but this is not to say that the Motivo won’t ship from Volumio direct if you ask nicely. 

Design 

• Large colour screen 
• Single physical control 
• Solid metal chassis 

In recent years, there has been a trend with streamers to make them ‘headless’; effectively remove controls from them and turn them into featureless boxes that can be stowed out of sight. So long as the software is up to snuff, this is a perfectly valid means of using a streamer but it does mean that the actual interaction with your system becomes limited to whatever device you are running the app on. 

The Motivo seeks to redress this. It is dominated by an 8-inch IPS touchscreen that largely mimics what you would see in the Volumio app (annoyingly, some features like album tile view don’t make the transition across) and means you can use the unit itself as a control point. It’s not going to be up there with messing around with a turntable for tactility but it’s a fairly significant departure from the norm. 

Anything seeking to do this is going to depend on the screen being colourful and responsive and Volumio has done a decent job here. It responds promptly and has enough precision to ensure you select the function you actually want and not something in the vicinity of it. The only physical control is a large red button above the display, which is both a power button and volume control. It’s a little weird to begin with but something you get used to quite quickly. 

I do think that the industrial design and the standard it has been built is a good one though. The chassis is made from metal and while the Volumio feels a little different to more mainstream rivals, it is every bit as well made. It does run fairly warm in use but this has had no effect on performance whatsoever. 

Features

• Streamer, transport and headphone out
• Digital and analogue outputs with headphone functionality
• ESS DAC for decoding 
• Impressive control interface 

As a device, the Motivo is a piece of source equipment that can function at a line level, as a transport or as a headphone amplifier. To attach speakers you’re either going to have to go active or sort an amplifier, be it powered or integrated. To use the Motivo as a streaming front end, you have the option of RCA and XLR connections; the latter of which has a central socket for 6.35mm headphone use as well. These can be used at a fixed level into an integrated amp or you can use the Motivo as a preamp into a power amp and make use of its own volume control. 

The decoding for the audio section is an ESS9038 DAC although Volumio does not specify which of the many models they’ve chosen. These chips are naturally balanced by design so the circuit of the Motivo is balanced by default. The Motivo can decode PCM to 384kHz and DSD to 256, which should be enough for most music libraries even if it isn’t quite state of the art. Alternatively, if you have a DAC you like, the internal decoding of the Motivo can be bypassed entirely and you can use USB, coaxial or optical outputs to send the signal to your DAC. If you do use USB, the sample rate handling increases to 768kHz PCM and DSD512. 

At the back (the shape of the Motivo is such it’s not completely logical to label it this but, for the most part, it will be pointed away from you), is fitted with the analogue and digital outputs and saves space by fitting the headphone sockets into the XLR connections. There are some limitations though. 

The first is that, while many rivals have digital inputs, the Volumio does without so you can’t use it as a hub for other digital sources. Despite the balanced connections, the Motivo is also not a balanced headphone amp. Instead, each XLR offers up a single ended connection that gives you a choice between high and low impedance connections controlled by a Texas Instruments TPA6120A2 chipset. 

It would be technically possible to not tell the Motivo it’s running as a headphone amp and use the XLR connections but you’d need to be careful not to overdrive headphones in this configuration. 

Buying a Motivo gives you access to the Volumio platform with all the bells and whistles switched on (something that wasn’t the case with their earlier hardware which only allowed access to the basic version) and this is no bad thing. Volumio is continuously evolving the operating system and this latest version feels slicker and more cohesive than when I last used it a few years ago. As the software does a great many things, it has a large number of customisable options that makes it more involved to set up and get running than something like Cambridge Audio’s Stream Magic and it can become a bit confusing but if you don’t get suckered in, it’s a pleasant and well laid out thing. 

Streaming service integration is based around Spotify, Tidal and Qobuz, the former two with Connect support. Deezer support has long been teased but has not materialised as yet. Internet radio and podcast options are very good as well, supported by some really impressive user plugins. AirPlay is also supported and Volumio is promising Roon support in the future as well which would be welcome too.  

Sound Quality 

• Detailed but refined presentation
• Some quirks with filtering and upsampling 
• Excellent headphone amp

Whatever the USPs of the Volumio’s interface, it will ultimately live or die on whether it sounds any good and here it gets off to an excellent start. Via both the balanced and unbalanced connections, the Motivo is capable of balancing accuracy and impressive detail retrieval with enough forgiveness of less than perfect recordings to ensure that you can happily keep listening to them and not have it tell you all the things wrong with it. 

Listening to the lovely Beauty in your Wake by Fink, the Motivo gets all the basics right. These are not huge scale pieces; more often than not, they are simply Fink and his guitar and the most minimal of backing musicians. There’s no place for a device to hide in getting material like this right and the Volumio puts in a very fine performance. 

Ask it for something bigger and more complex like Hybrid’s Morning Symphony and the Motivo delivers an excellent feeling of order and cohesion underpinned by genuinely excellent bass. There’s little sense of the Motivo imparting its own character on the performance either; it’s fun when it should be and considered when that’s the requirement too.

Not everything is completely as you might expect though. Like a number of digital products on the market, the Volumio has adjustable digital filters. In most case, these make incredibly subtle differences to the presentation (and on some things I’ve tested they seem to make no difference at all). 

On the Motivo, some of them (the Brick Wall and Minimum Phase fast Roll Off in particular) alter the presentation quite significantly; to the extent where the Motivo sounds conspicuously different to other digital sources here. Then, just to confound you a bit further, the upsampling options in the app (to boost the sample rate of a 44.1kHz file to 88.2kHz for example) has no discernible effect on the performance at all.

I’m prepared to forgive these oddities though because as well as being a good source in a conventional hi-fi system, the Motivo is a very good headphone amplifier. Tests with a pair of Focal Clear MG headphones extracted a level of performance that, even judged at the price point, is seriously impressive. 

This is also where the design of the Motivo really comes into its own too. Placed near your listening position it becomes a very compelling way to access your music collection without scrabbling around for a phone or tablet. It’s a genuinely pleasurable way to browse your collection while enjoying a top tier level of performance as you do so.

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