Stylish and trend setting, the Yamaha MusicCast is a multi-room audio system with a built-in hard drive that stores and streams your digital tunes to as many as five wireless radio clients spread anywhere throughout your home. The clients are compact and sleek, with a set of powerful speakers, a preamp for pumping out high quality streams, and an LCD interface that lets you visually browse through your tracks.
The MusicCast works flawlessly. In our tests streaming never stuttered or skipped, and the music quality was as good as playing a CD. The only catch is that the MusicCast does not allow you to stream directly from a PC, which puts this device in a category of its own. The closest competitor is Sony’s RoomLink, which also uses a client-server approach to wireless streaming. Other devices, such as the HP Digital Media Receiver, let you stream content only to a home stereo.
The MusicCast is like having your own radio station. It’s an all-in-one solution that lets you maintain a massive collection of music on a server and listen to it directly on a home stereo or from the clients scattered around your house.
The MusicCast supports standard audio CDs and MP3 CDs. If you have a collection of MP3 files on your computer, you can burn them onto CD and then rip the CDs onto the MusicCast server, which takes about five minutes per CD. When you record a CD, the MusicCast uses an internal Gracenote database for adding the artist, album, and track information to the audio content. There’s an Ethernet connection on the back of the server that connects to your broadband connection to grab new Gracenote data off the Internet.
The preamp lets you play CDs and listen to them on your receiver without having to record the CD. There’s one optical and one coaxial digital input for recording music from a DVD player or other digital device. You can stream a radio signal from a home receiver to the clients. The server lets you connect a PS/2 keyboard for controlling the interface, which displays on your television.
The interface is easy to use. You can browse through your music collection, record CDs, and add new clients with a few taps of the remote or keyboard. Because it can’t stream music directly from your PC, you’ll have to burn a lot of CDs to move your collection from one device to another.
Once you start using the MusicCast, however, you’ll wonder why you listened to music any other way. The 80GB hard disk allows you to keep all your music in one place and stream the content to any room. The quality of the stream is better than any other digital media receiver on the market, hands down.
-- by John Brandon
Yamaha MusicCast
Price: $2,800 (server and client), additional clients $600
Pros
• Easy installation and setup
• Connects to a home receiver, DVD player, and other digital audio sources
• Streamed media never stuttered
Cons:
• Can’t stream audio files from your PC
• Expensive
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