The smart stu – Yamaha MusicCast
We’re great fans of Yamaha’s MusicCast — twice awarding it as our Wireless Multiroom System of the Year, and writing at length on its strengths and quirks. Foremost among the latter for those first encountering MusicCast is its frequently flaky set-up, where the app just can’t find the unit you’re trying to connect. Oen it’ll connect on the second or third attempt, so our advice is to persevere. With the R-N402, things stalled at the point where we were supposed to connect our smart device to the unit’s own Wi-Fi hotspot, which just didn’t show up, despite the correct flashing green light (and despite even us getting it on the network with an Ethernet cable). We kept restarting and rebooting; no Wi-Fi hotspot. Then, a full 90 minutes later, we noticed its Wi-Fi suddenly appear. We connected, and all worked perfectly thereaer. The mysteries of networking. If at first you don’t succeed...
Once connected, you allocate the R-N402 to a room (we chose Garden Studio 3, right), which can be linked with others if you have multiple MusicCasts, or to any spare Bluetooth device within range via MusicCast’s ability to send as well as receive by Bluetooth, sharing with any brand of speaker or headphone.
On the main control screen (right), you can change inputs or select online music services, which include Pandora (shown here in the right navigation column), Spotify and internet radio. Networked music shares can be accessed through ‘Server’, which yielded variable speeds and track ordering depending on the UPnP share under scrunity; you can play tracks directly or add them to the MusicCast playback queue. Codec support is great, up to 24-bit/192kHz FLAC, WAV and AIFF, and 24/96 Apple Lossless over the network. We couldn’t persuade it even to display DSD content from our UPnP shares, but this may be a NAS serving issue, as there was no problem with DSD content playing from a stick plugged into the USB drive (which sounded wonderful).
MusicCast remains one of the easiest app platforms to use, and continues to improve, one handy recent addition being the ability to store whole room settings — providing rapid access to, say, Pandora in shule mode as shown in the main MusicCast screen here.