MusicCast VINYL 500
Roll up roll up, come see this freak of the hi-fi world — a turntable that does Spotify and Tidal... and internet radio and high-res network streaming. A turntable that has AirPlay and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and Ethernet. You can plug it into an amplifier, but you can equally send its output wirelessly to speakers all around the home, and have everything under app control (except, er, changing the record). All this, and it plays vinyl too. It’s the wonder of the age!
That’s what happened when Yamaha put MusicCast into a turntable. While old-school vinyl junkies may moan, those returning to the black stuff don’t have to tussle with the terror of separates (which really, are easy, just ask your dealer). You can just have the turntable and a Bluetooth speaker. Or in a home of MusicCast products you can play the record in one room and have that vinyl sound wafting through the whole home — for 20 minutes or so, anyway: there’s no auto-flip or even repeat function.
Impressively, you wouldn’t guess it was loaded with high tech just by looking at its gloss black plinth and straight 22cm tone arm. The cartridge is a white Audio-Technica movingmagnet design, with a replacement stylus setting you back a mere $20.
As well as beaming out through MusicCast speakers like the two MusicCast 20s pictured above, it has full MusicCast streaming abilities, the sound exiting through its line-level outputs, noting that if you use the turntable’s phono-level outputs into a better external phono stage (which is worth doing) then you lose MusicCast streaming abilities. But you gain even more of the impressive vinyl sound of which the Vinyl 500 is capable, which is well up with other non-smart decks at its price. Quite the product!