I hate karaoke it's loud it's dumb and
I'm already both of those things hey what the heck it's such a good intro but
look it's not about me karaoke is beloved by millions of people including
my kids so when my daughter asked for a karaoke machine for her birthday well
what kind of father would I be if I said no the kind of father who didn't want to
navigate a nigh impenetrable wall of AliExpress junk and air written review
use to find a setup of reasonable price high quality and low complexity is a
real challenge but as we dug deeper we found ourselves immersed in one of the
most wholesome and dedicated communities on the web so if you're like me you may
not love Koke but you may love rabbit holes so grab a shovel and a mining
helmet and start digging with me but
before we go it's time for the Segway to
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link here's my wants list the system needs to be easy enough for kids to
handle ideally take advantage of speakers that I already own it should
have as few proprietary components as possible and be reliable and repairable
so nothing that's E-Waste the second that I open the box I would like it to
have four inputs so that my kids can enjoy it with friends and family but if
I have to settle for less then I will in the last 17 days I have learned far more
about karaoke machines than I ever cared to we've come up with three solutions
that meet Linus' criteria with varying levels of success but it wasn't easy at
least on the English internet there is surprisingly little good information out
there about karaoke machines even Reddit where there's a community for everything
was kind of dead honestly the biggest problem though was the one requirement
lonus didn't mention he didn't want to spend a fortune on this which pretty
much eliminated a commercial grade setup with wireless microphones so lowering
our Ambitions we picked up a Yamaha m6x it's a nice sturdy and compact mixer
that has nice vocal effects that can go a long way to providing that karaoke bar
feel and the mixer has virtually no noise and is relatively simple to use
use for adults we'll get to that later first what mics did we get quality no
offense to lonus and his kids is not that important for karaoke but what is
is durability thankfully sure kind of nails both while we could have gone with
the perennial favorite the sh sm58 we decided to save some money and go with
the entry-level pga48 it's all metal sounds decent but it's hampered by some
obnoxious handling noise that might take some practice to avoid you'll also need
some practice hooking it up XLR C cables to plug this into the mixer qu in to RCA
from the mixer to the AV receiver maybe some adapters some cable management
products from LTC store.com by the time we've got all the accessories we need
we're looking at a pretty hefty bill for our cable noodle salad down here and we
don't even have any extras like mic stands yet but before we invest in those
we want to listen to the system so let's just plug the mixer into the AV system
plug our computer into the HDMI port on the TV and
just kidding just kidding you thought he was going to do that the output coming
from this mixer should not be fed into your typical home audio setup the quick
explanation is that your home audio equipment is designed to play finished
files that are leveled and compressed and stuff like that whereas the signal
from microphones can have really loud Peaks that can actually damage your
Hardware it might not be super likely but why risk it that's why we snagged
this PA speaker from the office for testing it also gives us the option of
running the music through the into the PA or we can have the vocals on
the PA speakers with the music running through the home theater which will reduce the total number of cables but
also make balancing levels a bit of a pain in the butt another benefit of the
PA though is that we can move it to reduce the likelihood of feedback which
is great but how are we going to get music into the speakers YouTube's a
great place for tons of karaoke tracks but it has a few problems queuing stuff
is a bit tedious and quality varies greatly and your favorite tracks might
be ripped from your grasp at any moment if YouTube decid besides that they're
not worthy also downloading from YouTube can
be thankfully there are other platforms like
iunes which is the best name ever or better yet karaoke nerds where you can
find high quality karaoke tracks for purchase or streaming and you can even
request karaoke versions of your favorite songs to be made that's pretty
cool unless you're willing to tip for their services though you're going to be
waiting a long time for your song to be karaoke fied but you should consider
doing that because thanks to these folks the internet is full of bar emptying
hits from bands like swans and Captain beefart is that I've never heard of them
you've never heard of Captain Bart anyway I think it's time to show my kids
I've spent more than I intended and we could have saved some money if we'd gone
with cheaper stuff but the good thing about it is this is mostly Pro suumer
grade audio equipment that should hold its value reasonably well let's try it
out okay girls you know how sometimes someone gets a birthday present but
everyone kind of shares it yeah yeah that's happen
that means that you get to see
first what's that what do you mean what's that maybe your older sister can
tell you wow it's a video
game what the got here hold take these
okay what is it karaoke yeah do you guys want to try
it say you're not going to try it
John they're camera shy so I guess it's going to be me and Adam trying out the
setups there's three different ones and I kind of wanted you guys to
help me pick which one that's not great didn't you say you
wanted karaoke what
remember no that moment when the parent
has a better memory for what the kid asks for for a birthday than the kid
does yeah you did it was a while back
all right get out of here
I guess you get to hear me and Adam try them out let's go yes I've been
broken I could let go I can't keep a
straight face you know what it sounds great though yeah you're my
Wonder remember when I said there were three options though let's talk about
the all-in-one packages when you first look on Amazon you will be inundated by
hundreds of options that are all variations of the same five or six products being sold by a myriad of
alphabet soup drop shippers and from the research we did most of these systems
fall short in one way or another the big one is just how proprietary so many of
the wireless mics are but we think we may have found a good one we were turned
on to the icario Shell S1 by a Reddit user named David _ PGH and he seems to
have put the entire Reddit karaoke community on his back supporting them
with endless knowledge and recommendations he responds to like
every threat rad shout out David it's people like you that make this world a
better place this really is the whole package it's a portable powered speaker
with two wireless microphones and a place to store them a 10.1 in
touchscreen running Android 13 that is pre-loaded with get this karaoke apps
that makes sense right on the main menu we have YouTube which is actually just
Mozilla Firefox but don't worry about that that just makes it better than being just YouTube and caraun which
we'll talk about in a little bit while it only has two wireless inputs we can
plug a wired mic into the back for three panels of audio along with auxiliary in
and out HDMI out and we can run our own songs off of a USB drive the microphones
sound great with strong directionality to prevent feedback very little latency
great range unlike many karaoke singers and very little handling noise there's
no cables to trip over and while you can still surprise yourself with how loud
the thing is I don't have to worry about blowing up my home theater system when
someone drops a microphone or messes with the settings of course there are
downsides the components here they are not repairable replaceable or
resellable so when the battery goes on these mics and they will they will be
gone and unless we can access the bootloader on this Android tablet
which I mean if any Community is going to do it it might be the karaoke
Community they're crazy dedicated but you can't count on that let's try this
thing out want it that way so that's the
clean original mic mode and then we can go to karaoke hello W that's just a lot
of Reverb that's a lot of Reverb I have a
super um okay okay this one's called
profession not professional but profession I want cartoon we got oh my
God what's moner oh my God hello hello
children the speaker quality on this thing not great it's loud it's
acceptable between the mic and the speaker it handles your Voice better
than it handles mine I wonder how much of that is to do with the speaker itself
or if it's the microphon I imagine the microphones would usually be biased to
be good across a broad variety of voices
but feel them they are very light not a lot going on in here hey
they they put the charging ring all the way around the base put them inol you
just Chuck them in there and then and turn them off though because oh yeah cuz
otherwise that'll happen but you don't have to worry about it happening to your speakers that's true
you heard us mentioned caraun earlier it's really really cool an amazing
service with a library of 61,000 plus tracks of highquality remakes of songs
with accurate lyric timing adjustable background vocal levels key changing to
suit your voice easy queuing of tracks and like 400 tracks for free just to
test out in case you don't want to Shell out $10 a month for the subscription but
honestly just paying 10 bucks for one night of karaoke that's that's kind of
worth it this thing is honestly great and one of the coolest things is you can
bring it to a party and be doing karaoke Within seconds with no one needing to be
taught at $280 it's not cheap but it
undercut the price of our quality DIY setup so yeah sure you could go with a
cheaper all-in-one system but this
actually a pretty compelling package there is a third option that Bridges the
gap between an all-in-one and a DIY uh most in-one type setup if you will the
one we have today is from soundtown but also there's like another company that
makes the same thing I think it's kind of another drop Shippy situation but
unlike other Solutions this has HDMI pass through which means it will work
seamlessly with the rest of your setup and converting your signal to digital
will lower the risk not eliminate it of damaging your AV setup so if you want to
hook up to that instead of getting a dedicated PA speaker maybe try it at
around 100 bucks this thing is a great deal coming with two wireless mics that
don't sound half bad and if you want you can grab some cheap mics and plug them
in via the quarter-inch jacks on the front sadly they're going to be on the
same two channels whatever it should be okay
you're all seeing the same song and thanks to convenient HDMI pass through
this could be the easiest solution of any we've seen so far all right let's
try it hey now you're an allar get your game on go play yeah so the quality is
not the highest but it's simple you have the cables probably already and you just
need a laptop there's no doubt in my mind that the Yamaha mixer blows away
the other Solutions if I was going to host it and use it in my home 100% the
Yama but this is for kids to use and I don't
trust them to be able to deal with this
when it does get messed up and also you could damage stuff with it just hot glue
the buttons in place yeah and have fun
reselling your Yamaha mixer I think it might be Sound Town population
me the Quick Change double a batteries
that's pretty appealing compared to some proprietary Battery Solution you can
plug in more micro phones so it is adaptable and if maybe if you do keep
the mixer for other reasons or you have another mixer you could split out and have two inputs anyways to your point if
it was for me and it was something that I knew I was going to be there to configure I would absolutely go DIY yeah
this is awesome this is great it sounds so much better and you're going to be
able to use it for other stuff you could use it at your desk for streaming and
stuff like that like with that said if you're kind of willing to spend the
extra 300 bucks for like 50% of people in this world I would say this is a
great option because you also get a speaker it's all one packed easy to use
system it's pretty appealing if I was moving around or I was like Street
busking look at this it's got the little like strap thing on it yeah comes with
the strap too regardless of which setup works best for you we hope you guys
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