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 AI written reviews. 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 karaoke, but you may love rabbit holes.
So grab a shovel and a mining helmet and start digging with me.
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 Linus 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 MG06X. 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 for adults.
We'll get to that later. First, what mics did we get?
Quality, no offense to Linus and his kids, is not that important for karaoke,
but what is, is durability. Thankfully, Shure kinda nails both.
While we could have gone with the perennial favorite, the Shure 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 cables to plug this into the mixer, quarter inch to RCA from the mixer to the AV receiver,
maybe some adapters, some cable management products from LTTstore.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 gonna 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 mixer 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. Cuing stuff
is a bit tedious and quality varies greatly, and your favorite tracks might be ripped from your
grasp at any moment if YouTube decides that they're not worthy. Also, downloading from YouTube can be
Thankfully, there are other platforms like iCroons, 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 barry, emptying hits from bands like Swans and Captain Beefheart. I've never heard of them.
You've never heard of Captain Beefheart? 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
prosumer 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 happening. 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... Here, take these. Okay, what is it?
Yeah. You guys want to try it?
You're not going to try it?
They're camera shy, so I guess it's going to be me and Adam trying out the subs.
There's three different ones, and I kind of wanted you guys to help me pick which one.
That's so great. Didn't you say you wanted karaoke? Remember?
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 brokenhearted. My, my, I could never let you go.
I can't keep a straight face. You know what? It sounds great though. Yeah.
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.
A 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 DavidO underscore 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
thread. 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 inch 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 KaraFun, 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 channels 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,
might be the karaoke community, they are crazy dedicated, but you can't count on that. Let's try
this thing out. So that's the clean, original mic mode. And then we can go to karaoke. Hello.
Whoa, this is a lot of reverb. That's a lot of reverb. Super. Okay. Okay, this one's called
profession, not professional, but profession. I want cartoon. Oh, my God. What's the most? Oh, my
God. 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 microphone. I imagine the microphones
would usually be biased to be good over across a broad variety of voices, but feel them. They are
very light. There's not a lot going on in here. Hey, they put the charging ring all the way around
the base. You just chuck them in there and then and turn them off. Oh, yeah, because otherwise
that'll happen. But you don't have to worry about it happening to your speakers. That's true.
You heard us mention Karafun earlier. It's really, really cool and amazing service with a library of
61,000 plus tracks of high quality 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 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 is actually a pretty compelling package. There is a third option that bridges the gap
between an all-in-one and a DIY, a 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 dropshippy 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, 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. This should be okay. You're all singing 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 all-star, 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 Yamaha. 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 Soundtown Population Me. The Quick Change AA batteries,
that's pretty appealing compared to some proprietary battery solution. You can plug in
more microphones. 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. 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 compact, 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.
Comes with the strap too. Regardless of which setup works best for you, we hope you guys learn
something today. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe you'll enjoy, I can't think of a more
random rabbit hole we've ever gone down. We'll get a video recommendation up there. Yeah,
you'll be a good one. You'll be a good one. Go watch it. Dash cams? Sure.