Thermaltake Mozart iP Media Case

Moving to the front of the Tt Mozart iP we find our optical drive bay area on the left.  The Mozart iP is offered with or without the Media Center VFD unit installed.  Our review sample came with this option installed which occupies the lowest of the three 5.25" bays.  Immediately next to this is a three 3.5" drive rack and 80mm intake fan.  The rack is removable which allows easier drive installation as well as the necessary access to screw points to install any optical drive.  Surprisingly, there was a 3.5" cutout behind the rack on the bezel wall, presumably for a floppy drive but no corresponding slot externally available on the front bezel.

The back side of the Thermaltake Media Center Unit.  Something nice about having the Mozart iP with this option is that it is already wired in so the unit and the iPod reader are powered by pass through cables that go between the PSU's main ATX power cable and your mainboard.  The second shot below is what this cable looks like.  A picture is worth a thousand words.

Other cool stuff in the box

A couple of boxes come along with the Mozart iP case.  The first of these is the software and remote for Thermaltake's Media Center.  (The ATX pass-through cable in this instance is an extra.)  The second box has the Mozart's iPod remote, reader card, polishing cloth, audio pass over cable and mounting screws for hardware to be installed in the case. 

We have tunes iTunes

After installing a system and later on the iTunes program, we had a chance to play around with an iPod dropped in the case.  Very nice.  The external dial control of the iPod is accessible if you want to select items that way but the controller is spot on and worked flawlessly.

We mentioned an audio cable earlier.  This cable connects your system's audio out to the iPod reader card which is where your speaker out now connects.  In playing with the iPod in the Mozart iP, everything was perfect as far as the iPod specific use was concerned.  We did run into a problem though elsewhere.  All the other system audio could no longer be heard.  We could plug the speaker cable back into the audio card and get sound fine however.  The pass through card wouldn't allow dual audio.  This had to be a fluke as proxy cards are nothing new or technologically advanced.  The card could be a bum unit or simply damaged in shipping.  A bad card like this while viewed as rare still needs to be noted.

The Thermaltake Media Center allows PC control to be delegated to the remote we saw earlier.  Multiple hot buttons to include 'my TV', 'my Movie', DVD, volume, channels etc make the unit a big hit.  It also sports mouse control and click functions.  The display is customizable to have any mix of system information, e-mail, news, weather or other third party apps that can be displayed via a VFD.  Below is a shot of the Media Center with the drive bay door folded down.  It is also visible with the door up through the mirrored window. 

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