Yamaha MusicCast

There are so many MusicCast products that we don’t even have room to list them all! This is a streaming and multiroom system that encompasses speakers, hi-fi, AV, even a turntable and a piano...

MusicCast 20 MusicCast 50 MusicCast BAR 400 MusicCast VINYL 500 MusicCast NX-N500

MusicCast is Yamaha’s streaming and multiroom platform, and is used across such a large selection of its products that we’ll have to take a deep breath just to list the categories — there are standalone MusicCast products such as wireless speakers (three, including a true stereo pair which remains our favourite multiroom product ever), five varying levels of soundbar with subwoofer, and its highly successful range of AV receivers (14 are MusicCastequipped at the last count, but that’s about to increase). There are three little MusicCast lifestyle amplifiers, three hi-fi stereo amplifiers, two compact music systems, and a pair of MusicCast-equipped amplifiers designed specifically for custom-installed multi-room audio. Not forgetting the wireless multiroom turntable introduced a couple of years ago to great acclaim and a Sound+Image Award. Oh, and a grand piano — specifically the Disklavier ENSPIRE, which doesn’t even require you to be very good at piano, because it can play itself and send the sound through MusicCast to all your other MusicCast systems. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Sonos.

So we think it fair to pronounce MusicCast to be the most comprehensively-served wireless multiroom platform in terms of kit that supports it, short of thirdparty platforms like Chromecast or AirPlay. Mind you, MusicCast supports AirPlay 2 as well, so it can join that party with any other AirPlay 2 products, and also supports voice control via either Google Assistant, Alexa or, via AirPlay 2, Apple’s Siri. All this also explains why we haven’t included a full pricing list for MusicCast — too long!

The app

While MusicCast’s app gets regular updates with tweaks and new abilities (six updates during 2019, for example), the fundamentals have remained in place since day one. It uses ‘rooms’ to organise your multiroom systems, and allows you to take your own

pics for each room or use stock shots, so that the room images make the home screen of MusicCast extremely inviting, and emphasise 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. This includes all the physical inputs available to the device, plus the options of AirPlay and Bluetooth, plus Spotify, Tidal, Deezer and internet radio, which last year switched from using vTuner to ‘airable’ radio. MusicCast supports Spotify Free outside the MusicCast app but not within (you just select your MusicCast unit as a device under the normal Spotify app), whereas Tidal and Deezer open within the app itself for more integrated control, though you may anyway prefer the more detailed presentation of the native apps.

You can also access the music on your device itself, or select ‘Server’ to access DLNA music shares on your network, though depending on your network, your NAS and luck, we’ve found this can be a bit sluggish.

Rather annoyingly the app also shows Pandora (Pandora has been unavailable to Australia since 2017). Yamaha’s Australian MusicCast website pages similarly show logos for SiriusXM, Qobuz and Napster, none of them available here, noting only that service availability varies by region.

One unwelcome recent addition to the app is information collection using Google’s Firebase Services, collected “for the sake of marketing analysis and service quality improvement”. This includes gender, interests and age, as well

as device information, and to be fair, many other systems do similar things and worse. Yamaha does at least make it clearly optional, so you can, as we did, stop the tracking from the start or turn it off later.

Far more pleasingly MusicCast has allowed input forwarding since its inception, so that anything you can connect to your MusicCast device, you can share to all the others. When you consider how many inputs are available on a MusicCast AV receiver, that’s a whole lot of versatility! Share TV sound, CD players, vinyl from your turntable — anything. Compare that with most rival systems which offer a single minijack analogue input for sharing, or none at all, and the possibilities seem enormous.

To link MusicCast devices together, you head to that pretty room screen and use the ‘link’ button at top left. If you’re input forwarding, you must start with that device and link other players to it, as this is a ‘Master’ plus ‘slaves’ arrangement where you control that master player and the linked players will output the same audio. On the room screen, the linked players disappear, leaving you with the master room, which will now display, for example “+2 rooms”. The volume bar still appears as a single slider in the app, but when selected it splits into multiple controls for the different rooms. Tone controls and balance are just a touch away from the ‘Now Playing’ screen, rather than buried deep in settings menus. You can also opt to have your device’s side buttons control the volume or not — an excellent option to have.

MusicCast also has a rather advanced form of speaker pairing called MusicCast Surround, which allows the use of MusicCast 20 or 50 wireless speakers as rears. Other multiroom systems have similar arrangements, but only with one or two soundbars, whereas Yamaha’s system works with two soundbars and some 15 other products currently (but likely more once this year’s receivers are launched). We’ve tried this solution with a mid-price receiver and much preferred the use of two MusicCast 20 units behind to deliver width suitable for multiple listeners, but if you’re alone, one MusicCast 50 directly behind your head does the job nicely too. We did realise, however, that using MusicCast with an AV receiver leaves the receiver’s two rear-channel amps entirely redundant, which seems rather a waste, while the combo is also unlikely to represent a paragon of tone matching between conventional front speakers and the new wireless rears.

Overall, then, we reckon MusicCast remains one of the market leaders in multiroom. It has genuine ease of use — and once connected it stays that way, which is rare. The technical performance of the products is high throughout the range, while the breadth of available equipment makes it a forerunner in providing the ability to combine convenience wireless products with real hi-fi systems and on up to best-in-class AV multichannel solutions.