Yamaha MCR-040

Design

Henry Ford is often attributed the quote regarding the choice of Model T Fords coming in any colour — as long as it was black. Whether the quote is accurate or not, the designers at Yamaha clearly weren't fans of this type of thinking, as the MCR-040 comes in a huge variety of colours. Amusingly — especially for audio gear, when it's far too often the norm — black isn't one of them.

That still leaves you with red, white, pink, orange, light grey, brown, dark blue, dark green, dark grey and light blue to pick from. The MCR-040 is a satellite system with speakers that are designed to be laid flat down; as such, you'll need a little more space for them than with your usual tall, "vertically mounted" speakers. It is a good-looking system, whether you use the supplied speaker cable to position the speakers far away from the core control unit or slap them right up against it.

The remote that Yamaha supplies with the MCR-040 is of the thin, credit card-style. This makes it very portable, but equally very easy to lose inadvertently.

Features

The MCR-040 offers a variety of audio playback options. The iPod docking connector on the top can take any recent model iPod, although annoyingly it's not shielded for iPhone usage, and you will get a pop-up message on any iPhone you plug into it. Having said that, during our testing it happily took in phone calls without that annoying heavy static noise that many unshielded speaker docks suffer from.

The MCR-040 is also DAB+ capable, as well as offering FM radio, USB and 3.5mm audio plug input and CD playback. CD in this day and age can't help but feel slightly retro, but it's a nice inclusion on the MCR-040. In speaker terms, the two satellites pump out 15W of power; not quite enough to blow your living room apart, but plenty for smaller office-style rooms.

Performance

The MCR-040 can mostly be run from the front panel display, but for more detailed functions you've got to rely on the remote control. It's the one bit of kit in the MCR-040's box that we found oddly out of place, simply because we're used to seeing this style of remote control bundled in with much cheaper sound systems. Thin remotes don't take up much space, but this makes them easier to lose, and means that individual buttons are quite small. Yamaha haven't done the MCR-040 too many favours with the layout, which puts the volume control down the lower left-hand side, but other features, such as play/pause and track skip, around a central round selection area. It's a weird layout with a distinct learning curve.

The learning curve is somewhat forgiven when you start playing back audio through the MCR-040. Sound quality was uniformly excellent with crisp reproduction and solid volume all the way up to the top level with only minor distortion at the most ear-splitting volumes. This was true for pretty much any audio, as we discovered while testing with a variety of CDs, iPhones iPods and even on a truly ancient 128MB USB Flash drive media player.

Conclusion

All so good, so far; the MCR-040's a cracking bit of kit, and probably worthy of an Editor's Choice gong, right? Well, almost. It was so very close to getting a shining recommendation from us, until we checked the local RRP against the price you'd pay for the same device overseas. The US price for the MCR-040 sits at around AU$279. That's quite a price difference, but to be fair, the US model is a DAB+ free zone. Not so with the UK model, where the average online price at time of writing is £199. In rough translation terms, that should equate to around $310. Local retail price, mirrored by Australian internet retailers, is a hefty AU$499. If you can find the Yamaha MCR-040 at a good price, it's a great system to get, but why are we being slapped with an additional near AU$200 on the asking price simply for being Australian?