It may look like yet another mid- priced AV receiver, but behind the RX-N600Ds familiar titanium coloured fascia is a story of AV-IT convergence. Okay, the USB port on the front is a bit of a giveaway - this is Yamaha's first Network AV receiver.
Using Windows Media Connect it allows you to play MP3, WAV and WMA music files from a remote PC, or listen to any radio stations on the internet. If you have a Yamaha MusiCAST system, the N600D acts as a seamless client and plays music files straight off USB storage devices. If that's not enough ways to feed digital music into your home entertainment system, it has a dedicated port for the Yamaha YDS-10 iPod dock, and a built-in DAB tuner.
The flip-side of cramming in all this in for under £600 is that many of the AV features that competitors sport at this price point have been axed. There's no HDMI switching, auto- setup or RoomEQ functionality and it's 6.1 channel rather than 7.1, so you can only use a single centre rear- surround speaker. The standard AV connections are all present, albeit in fairly limited numbers and surprisingly basic.
This means the AV setup is very swift of course, but the same can't be said of the networking. In true PC- networking style, nothing worked first time or without convoluted faffing. The idea is that you download Windows Media Connect to your host PC, click on file sharing, connect your Ethernet cable, update your internet radio lists from the vTuner database and away you go, with the N600D displaying station names, and full folder and track list information from your host PC's music catalogue or USB drive... theoretically.
After three hours of messing around with DHCP settings, MAC addresses, changing cables, re-installing WMC and reconfiguring Firewalls just to get device list on my PC to recognise the N600D, it was finally set up. So, ease of networking setup, nil points... but that goes without saying when PC technology is involved.
