Yamaha Vinyl 500
Contents
After all these words of praise about the techies, it’s now time to put the record player itself to the test. While we lift the plinth out of the box we immediately notice that we are not dealing with a budget turntable. Despite the interesting pricing, Yamaha provided the plinth with a beautiful high-gloss piano lacquer. Yamaha uses premium materials where necessary and opts for cheaper materials where this reduces the cost price but has no impact on the lifespan or sound quality. Prefer a white one? No problem. Yamaha supplies the Vinyl 500 without extra charge in both high gloss black and high gloss white piano lacquer. This makes the Vinyl 500 feel right at home in any interior. The combination with the vintage look makes this Vinyl 500 a real gadget.
However, the name Vinyl 500 has been chosen somewhat misleadingly. This turntable is so much more than just a turntable. Yamaha has in this vinyl 500 namely her MusicCast multiroom streaming platform built into which this turntable can do a few very interesting things. Combine the Vinyl 500 with two wireless MusicCast speakers and you even have a complete hi-fi system! The Vinyl 500 can also stream vinyl albums to other rooms in the MusicCast environment. The turntable and the hifi set do not have to be in the same room.
Last but not least, the Vinyl 500 is equipped with a MusicCast module. This second generation MusicCast module not only adds wireless functionality such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to the turntable, but the manufacturer even adds a complete highres audio streamer to the Vinyl 500. Lets you listen to Internet radio stations, stream music from Napster, Tidal, Qobuz and Deezer. Streaming music from Spotify, trusted from the Spotify app itself. If you have digital music files on a music server or NAS, this Vinyl 500 plays them in highres up to 24bit and 192kHz in PCM and up to DSD up to 11.2 MHz for you. Prefer to use Apple’s Airplay with iTunes? This is also possible. All you need is the free MusicCast controller for Android and IOS.
MusicCast Gen.2
Now the attentive reader will already have noticed that we are talking about a second generation MusicCast module. This module ‘2’ will be used in MusicCast products manufactured after 1 January 2018 and will therefore also find a place in this Yamaha Vinyl 500. This new module 2 has several advantages over the first generation MusicCast module, but is one hundred percent backwards compatible with MusicCast module 1.
While MusicCast generation 1 only works with 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, Yamaha has also added the 5GHz band in this second generation. Now 2.4GHz has a lower bandwidth, but (in theory) a higher range than the 5GHz band. In practice, however, the 2.4GHz band is so full that the networks of the entire neighbourhood influence the network performance in such a way that the operation is not always very stable. Even over shorter distances. Switching to 5GHz usually solves this problem, if it weren’t for the fact that your neighbors are probably already behind this and the same problem now occurs more and more often with 5GHz networks. This is why Yamaha did a smart trick on the 5GHz band.
Yamaha has a so-called DFS option built into the 5GHz Wi-Fi module, which can be turned on if you experience reception problems. Dynamic Frequency Selection (or: DFS) ensures that the Wi-Fi channel automatically switches to another channel if another stronger signal is detected. However, a few 5GHz channels have been reserved which in some countries may not be used for Wi-Fi, but are intended exclusively for radar installations. In spite of DFS, these always remain free. With the DFS option in the MusicCast module 2 you can switch the MusicCast network to one of these free channels, eliminating interference from surrounding 5GHz networks that the neighbors with non-MusicCast products often cannot reach.
More beautiful
The new MusicCast module 2 also sets up its own 5GHz Wi-Fi connection (Wireless Direct) to the surround speakers in the MusicCast network and these signals do not go over the Wi-Fi router. Whereas the previous MusicCast generation can only control nine rooms wired or over Wi-Fi, a Generation 2 MusicCast product as a link master can control up to twenty wired rooms and up to ten Wi-Fi rooms. Despite many second generation MusicCast products up to 384kHz PCM (Gen.1: 192kHz) and DSD4X (Gen.1: 2x DSD2X), the maximum streaming capacity of the module in the Vinyl 500 is limited to PCM 192kHz and DSD2x. In addition, the Vinyl 500, like the wireless generation 2 MusicCast speakers, Amazon Alexa voice control integrated.
