Multiroom system
When we presented this award to Yamaha at our Presentation Dinner, we accused the company of being rather late to the multiroom party compared with some competitors. We were corrected, quite rightly, since Yamaha’s original MusicCast appeared 11 years ago, hopelessly before its time, and so in truth Yamaha was a pioneer and has merely been biding its time. And now it has relaunched an entirely new MusicCast, it has taken the bold decision to put the system in as many of its products as possible. So while the main launch centred on four key products — the BAR (p88), the STUDIO (p91), and the two products inset above, the FRAME and the PLUS, the company also put MusicCast in most of its AV receivers, micro systems and more. Buy any hi-fi or AV Yamaha product of signficance, and you’ll most likely be bringing MusicCast into your home. Even some models from earlier this year and last can be firmware updated to MusicCast abilities — so you may already have one.
Plus there’s a rather useful bonus — each MusicCast device can not only receive a Bluetooth stream, it can also send one — to any Bluetooth receiver, not just a MusicCast system. So any Bluetooth speaker you already own can be paired to a MusicCast player (only one each, mind), with only Bluetooth range limiting this extension of your MusicCast eco-system.
All MusicCast units also have Apple AirPlay built in, which is a necessity for Mac users as the MusicCast app itself doesn’t index iTunes collections for direct play. Android and Windows users have it easy thanks to DLNA streaming from any shares on your network straight through the app.
All this puts a lot of pressure on the app, and on the quality of connections. Because as we’ve found with other wireless multiroom systems, it’s not much use delivering fine hardware if the control system doesn’t work. Happily this is a good one. It leads with ‘room’ images of your various zones, which you can personalise, making the home screen extremely inviting, and emphasising the multiroom abilities of the system.
To control any given room, you tap that picture, and you’re presented with a new screen for that device (shown above left for the NX-N500 speakers). This includes all the physical inputs available to the device, plus the options of AirPlay and Bluetooth, plus internet radio, Spotify, Pandora, the music stored on your device itself, and ‘Server’ for DLNA music shares on your network.
Select Pandora, and you’ll be invited to input your account information, and then a sidebar appears on the right to control Pandora within the app.
Most of the other music sources work in a similar way, opening a sidebar on the right, allowing navigation. All this worked highly effectively. We could see the playlists on our smart device itself, we could see DLNA shares on the network and could navigate (sometimes a little slowly) by all the usual options of folder, artist, artist/album etc. We ran our usual test files to see what file types it could stream and what it couldn’t, and it came out extremely well — pretty much everything except multichannel FLAC and one DSD file (DSD is listed as supported at both 2.8 and 5.6MHz). So MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC and WAV up to 24-bit/192kHz, AIFF, Apple Lossless even, all passed through the system and played through the MusicCast units.
Back on the room screen, there is a link button at top left which then invites you to select a ‘Master’ and then link other players to it. You control that master player, and the players you’ve linked will output the same audio.
There’s still room for improvement — it badly needs a search option or at least an alphabetical jump list for long lists of artists or internet radio. The scrolling is good but the names don’t load until a second or two after you stop.
But that’s what firmware updates are for; it’s early days for many multiroom systems, and it’s fun watching them get better by the month. It’s a brave new multiroom world, and Yamaha has launched itself high with MusicCast.
More info: au.yamaha.com