Final verdict
Contents
Waiting for the Yamaha Vinyl 500 will be rewarded. This turntable offers almost everything a modern music lover could wish for. Play records, stream music from your phone to the player as you’ve been doing for years and get to know Yamaha’s excellent MusicCast platform. Above all, the sound quality is of excellent level.
The quality of the materials used is excellent and also on important issues such as the bearing of the platform and the arm is nothing to be criticized. We believe that Yamaha offers a very good proposition through a smart mix of analogue and digital technology. The Vinyl 500 has excellent pricing and is therefore interesting for a very broad target group.
The Vinyl 500 is positioned at just under six hundred and fifty Euro retail. The MusicCast WXC-50 audio streamer alone costs just under four hundred Euros at the time of publication. A little nice phono preamplifier also costs about a hundred Euro. This means that the turntable functionality only has an additional cost of one hundred and fifty Euros. This very complete product of Yamaha deserves the highest score in terms of price and performance.
Comments
Although we are very pleased with the overall picture of this player, there are a few things we would like to see different with an MKII version. The player is equipped with damping feet, but despite this, vibrations from the floor surface are only moderately dampened. In addition, the turntable is completely manual and this means that the Vinyl 500 is not equipped with an automatic turn-off mechanism. For this piece of extra ease of use we would like to spend a few extra Euros.
When using the phono output instead of the line output with internal RIAA preamplifier, the streaming functionality of the Vinyl 500 can unfortunately not be used. It only works through the line output. It is a pity that the switch between phono and line output is done manually with a switch on the back and not automatically with a relay based on the source selection. This means that both outputs cannot be used at the same time. Should you eventually decide to prefer the phono output over the line output and continue to use the streaming functionality, the switch must be switched manually each time.
The pitch of the Vinyl 500, so the speed at which the platform spins, is a fraction higher than our digital albums on our NAS and on Redbook CD. We have no idea if it’s something exemplary or if the manufacturer did this on purpose. Unfortunately, we cannot influence this at the user level and will probably – if we want to do something about this – have to adjust this internally. If we could adjust this in the future via the app, this would of course be wonderful.
Components used
This review we have performed in combination with a Bryston BP26 preamplifier including MPS2 power supply and two Bryston 7B3 monoblocks. The cabling comes from JIB; the Boaacoustic Blueberry Signal XLR (BB-006) for the amplification, Blueberry Signal RCA (BB-005) for the turntable, Blueberry Klang (BB-008) serve as speaker cables to our Usher Dancer Mini 2 speakers and as power cables we use the Blueberry Strom (BB-007). We have been using this JIB Boaacoustic cable range for some time now and it satisfies us perfectly. This Blueberry entry-level series is completely new and performs significantly better than the included OEM cables. Just like the Yamaha Vinyl 500, this Blueberry series has an excellent price-performance ratio.
