Yamaha MCX-1000 MusicCAST Digital Audio Server

Rating:
Summary: very nice product
Review: I bought one of the MusicCast systems as soon as it was available (after drooling over it at a couple of trade shows). The first thing I did was upgrade the harddrive to 200GB. Required a trip by my dealer to my house, but it gave me much more capacity. The interface is very intuitive. It's very fast at copying from cd to the internal disk. In the background, it converts from PCM to whatever MP3 compression level you've set for default (I always use 320KB). You can remove the PCM version to save space (I keep it for critical listening stuff, but my wife doesn't care, so her PCM's are deleted immediately :-) I have a couple of the MCX-A10 terminals scattered around the house. I've had them connect through ethernet and wireless and seems to work fine for both. Yamaha just released a software update that allows access to the MusicCast database through a web browser. This makes it very easy to fix titles, artists, etc. (You can plug a keyboard into the MusicCast, but it requires powering down which is too much trouble for me). I have to say that the most annoying thing about the MusicCast is the GraceNote CDDB database. Yamaha's implementation is great. The CDDB database is a mess. Album titles are inconistent, misspelled, etc. That's why having the browser editing is such a big deal to me. The best endorsement I can give is that my wife really likes the MusicCast. She was sceptical, but after seeing how it works and being able to browse her music, she's sold. Highly recommended for anyone who just wants to be able to enjoy their music without having to deal with PC's.

Rating:
Summary: Another TIVO
Review: I can't say enough about this product. I liken this to the enthusiasm most have with Tivo. I bought it last summer when it first shipped. My first one did have a hard drive problem after a couple of days but Yamaha was incredibly responsive and shipped me a brand new one overnight. I was actually very surprised at how easy it was to "get going"....less than 15 minutes including loading my first CD to the hard drive.
Using it is also so straightforward that my kids were able to use it after only a couple of minutes of coaching...they all have their own playlists now which they just love. I actually moved out of my house for a remodel project and set it up in the temporary housing without incident. Also I've gone through one product firmware upgrade and the addition of one "client" also without incident. I have two "clients" in the house and they kids love the ability to play their playlists at the same time in two different rooms.
A couple of things to note...you really need a TV monitor hooked to the server to effectively navigate the menus to do anything more than "play" or "record" (which most people will likely do anyway). Also be aware of the "recording" and "burning" rules/constraints before buying so your expectations are set appropriately if you like to "burn" playlists to CD's for use on portable devices.