Yamaha Musicast Streaming Turntable

Yamaha's Musicast Streaming Turntable won a prize at a Hifi Show a couple of years ago. Equipped with an Ethernet jack and WiFi, it's actually a music streamer capable of connecting to Spotify or Tidal, and network music servers and playing music through wireless Yamaha Musicast speakers. For around RM2,300 you get both a music streamer plus a free record player.

Yamaha's established Multi Room WiFi technology under the Multicast brandname is accessed via control apps on iOS, android, PC and Mac. Provided you have a Yamaha system with built-in Musicast technology, you have the ability to play music tracks stored on Network Attached Devices (NASs,) music servers, streaming platforms like Spotify and Tidal and of course LPs using the turntable.

The belt drive turntable has an attractive glossy black lacquer paint job. It comes with a pre mounted Audio Technica MM cartridge on a headshell. That simplifies the job of setting up the turntable a lot. All you need is to to align the headshell with tone arm, push in and tighten a locking collar. Setting up the counterweight and anti tracking bias is also a cinch if you have previously owned a record player.

The turntable has a built in phono preamp so it can be connected directly via RCA jacks that are provided to the Aux input of an amplifier. Of course, the WiFi turntable can also send signals directly to Bluetooth speakers or Wireless Wifi speakers like Yamaha's own Musicast brand. No wired connections are necessary.

For even better sound quality, you can bypass the built in MM phono preamp and plug into a high quality phono preamp (assuming you own one, and upgrade to a higher quality cartridge) . But bypassing the internal MM phono preamp means losing Multicast control via smartphone apps and also using Voice commands via Alexa and Google Home Assistant.

Yes, you can start the turntable using Voice commands if you also have the Google Home Assistant app and a Google Nest Hub.