Specifications

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wanted to connect it to my main theater room
upstairs but could only do it via analogue. Most
users will opt for the wired or wireless clients, so
my configuration scheme was a bit unusual as
was trying to route the MCX-2000 as a source
component through all of my audio systems
rather than using its ancillary devices such as
the MCX-A10 Wireless Digital Audio Terminal or
the MCX-C15 Distributed Audio Controller.
I connected the MCX-2000 to my router using
a straight-thru Ethernet cable as seen in Figure
1 above. This is how you connect your MCX-
2000 server to the Internet to take advantage of
the Gracenote CDDB CD recognition service.
MusicCAST comes armed with a very good
GUI (Graphical User Interface) which has the
same look and feel of what is in their most
recent receiver line up. The first thing you will
want to do is engage the “Easy Setup” feature
to configure your music server and wireless/
wired clients.
Next you want to select your encoding
preferences in the Recording menu under
Setup. I chose “PCM + MP3” that way I had
the option of retaining the uncompromised
PCM transfer for high quality recordings that
I planned on doing critical listening to, or
discarding it in favor of the MP3 compression
scheme which frees up considerable hard drive
space. I discarded PCM data for all of my party
music, 80’s rock recordings and most of the
wife’s stuff since MP3 works just fine for her
(she isn’t as critical as I am with fidelity.) And
yes, I did get permission with the wife for doing
this, unlike some of you other folks out there
that would attempt to pull a fast one on your
significant other. I selected 256 kbps since it
was virtually indistinguishable on the recordings I
chose to implement compression on. According
to the stats page on the MCX-2000, this freed
up hundreds of recording hours for us, which
was needed given our vast musical tastes and
collection.
The first thing you will notice when ripping a
CD into MusicCAST is that it almost instantly
recognizes artist, title and song lists. This is
no coincidence. The MCX-2000 is powered
by Gracenote. Gracenote is an onboard (over
350k titles built in) and Internet-based database
system (originally developed by volunteers, but
then later licensed off) that contains informational
content on virtually any CD you throw at it. The
beauty of the MCX-2000 is it even works the
album-labeling and categorizing magic with no
Internet connection. You will still want to wire
up the system to the Internet as I found several
CDs that were not recognized until the MCX-
2000 pulled the info from the Gracenote server
online.
For more information about Gracenote, check
out this Gracenote informational.
Wanna be slick? The MCX-2000 allows
you to configure a Yamaha RS-232 equipped
receiver automatically for use with the
MusicCAST system. You can select the AV
receiver input to which the MusicCAST will be
connected, synchronize/slave power on/off of
the receiver to the MCX-2000, change surround
programs based on music genre, and even allow
MusicCAST clients to broadcast audio from
your receiver’s tuner section. You can even
set automatic playback and shutdown on each
of your remote clients. How’s that for custom
configurability? It makes you wanna stay in
the Yamaha family of products for your entire
theater solution. Yes?
XM, FM, Internet Radio
– Oh MY!
Did somebody say Radio? The MCX-
2000 has that (FM at least) and much more.
Manufacturers have made the push recently to
integrate XM into their product lines. Yamaha
is no different as they were one of the first to
implement XM in their receivers and have now
added it to the MCX-2000’s arsenal of supported
formats. Also new to the plate, is Internet
radio. The MCX-2000 was preconfigured with
Don’t skip this step as I found out the hard way
that it was impossible to get Ethernet connectivity to
run Internet radio without running through this. It’s
quick and painless, and very straightforward.
Note