Intro
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The LP is back on the road again. In addition to the seasoned music lover, especially the younger generation falls massively for the black vinyl. Yamaha meets this group with its affordable Yamaha MusicCast Vinyl 500 turntable, but what about the quality? For Alpha Audio the moment to take a pile of black nostalgia from the attic and explore it with pointed ears for you.
Yamaha has been scoring high for many years when it comes to affordable hi-fi products with high functionality and excellent sound quality. Yamaha tackles it as one of the few manufacturers in music country ‘different’. A good example is the Yamaha MusicCast system. There is not just a thirteen in a dozen multiroom systems, but an inventive system that hasn’t met its match yet. Yamaha goes a lot further with MusicCast than just integrating streaming or multiroom technology in a hi-fi receiver.
As the only music manufacturer in the world, Yamaha implements the MusicCast system in just about its entire musical delivery program, including in its high-quality musical instruments. This far-reaching integration is not just a marketing fact, but a valuable piece of extra functionality to allow music lovers to be even more music lovers. So the music lover is in the spotlight at Yamaha. We have seen this for some time with this manufacturer and this is why we have so much appreciation for this brand.
A strange piece
The Yamaha Vinyl 500 is a turntable that can do much more than just scanning an analog black disc. Unlike popular turntables in the same price range, this Yamaha has a few interesting features that will appeal to some target groups. But who is the target group of this Vinyl 500?
We see this record player as particularly interesting for that group of music lovers who mainly enjoy music via the smartphone. And this specific group, of often younger music lovers, is also discovering more and more the vinyl that is available for a few Euros per album at the local record store. Logical, because the search for music on vinyl provides so much more experience than streaming from the internet. Stroll through the wide range of products in the bins and then enjoy the new purchase together on the couch while enjoying a nice beer or a glass of alcoholic grape juice. Elevating music to a way of lifestyle; this is what music lovers are after all about, isn’t it?
Because the phone today can be seen as the centre of the musical experience, Yamaha has equipped the Vinyl 500 with different techniques so that the user can still play music via the familiar phone, but with the same ease can send digital music streams to the MusicCast turntable. This makes the Yamaha Vinyl 500 an outsider in its class. A bit of an oddball, as the Americans aptly call it. Coincidentally, we at Alpha-Audio have a weakness for quirky ‘oddballs’. Especially if we mean it in a good way. And oh, how this quirky Vinyl 500 appeals to us.
Despite this Yamaha turntable being a strange and unusual product, it is a product intended by Yamaha for everyday use with, moreover, optimal ease of use. And this is exactly where the Yamaha engineering department hits the nail right on the head with this Vinyl 500. We have no idea how the clever minds came up with this brilliant concept, but we expect them to follow market developments closely during the 16-hour working day and then, somewhere in the late hours of the day, to have had an ingenious impulse in an obscure karaoke bar while enjoying a few bottles of lukewarm sake as lame as a cricket. Brilliant. Homage to the technicians of Yamaha!
