Home karaoke set up recommendations?

October 26, 2015 11:32 AM

Looking for recommendations for a home ipad/computer driven karaoke set up! Considering all in one packages (Singtrix) vs. home brew.

Have an annual party where last year we ended with a couple hours of Karaoke courtesy of a friend's Singtrix machine. This year we need to get our own.

The songs all come from youtube or a karaoke service/app. That's no biggie. How to get the audio from the device mixed with mic and sounding good? That's the trick.

The Singtrix has the benefit of being "all in one" in that it has the mic, speaker, stand, ipad holder, and the "autotune" feature. The downside is the price and that the speaker doesn't cut it with a large room of drunk, rowdy adults.

I figure for less than $350 I could get a couple of mics, a small mixer and a PA, and run it via computer/ipad. I wouldn't have autotune, but I'd have a louder and more flexible system.

Does anyone have any recommendations on a set up like that? Or a reason I should stick with some kinda all in one deal?

Thanks in advance!

posted by malphigian to Home & Garden (3 answers total)

If you're not doing it often, maybe just borrow whatever equipment you need and try KaraFun. I did this for my 40th birthday last year. It was $6 for 24 or 48 hours, can't remember, plenty of songs to suit everyone.

You pay and have instant access. We ran it on a PC. My husband is a musician so he has this Thing (is it a mixer?) that we plugged into the computer and ran two mics and big speakers from it. We also had a couple of monitors plugged in. One facing the stage (a big sheet of MDF on milk crates, decorative skirt) so that the singers could see and another facing the audience so people could sing along.

It's very easy to use, no one had any trouble working out how to queue up songs.
posted by stellathon at 7:49 PM on October 26, 2015

If you're only using it once a year, you could look into renting either a larger louder karaoke machine/package or the mics, mixer, and PA speakers. (Local independent music instrument stores are likely to have the PA gear available for rental.)

If you're thinking about using the gear for more than your annual karaoke party, unfortunately, $350 doesn't go very far these days for mics and mixers and etc. unless you're talking used. To throw a complete package together for $350 you're honestly going to be looking at the very cheapest equipment. Your best case brands would be Mackie, Behringer or Samson, and anything that costs less than that (and some that costs more) I honestly could not recommend in good conscience - gear that cheap is entirely unreliable.

(To put it in some perspective, the Thing stellathon linked above is indeed a mixer - the Yamaha EMX212 powered mixer. Yamaha's generally a good brand, but that mixer costs $370 new, and you still haven't got speakers or microphones or cables.)

I wouldn't have autotune,

The Singtrix (and most karaoke systems) also has reverb and delay, and these effects can do a lot to make amateur singers sound better. Your cheapest mixers or powered speakers almost certainly won't have those effects built in, so that might be another reason to go with an "all-in-one" karaoke system.

and run it via computer/ipad.

Just checking here, but by "run it" you mean run the karaoke tracks off the computer/iPad, right? Because mixers/PA gear that're computer/iPad controllable are way outside your budget.
posted by soundguy99 at 8:38 PM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Actually, I may have been a little too discouraging above - part of the problem with recommending stuff over the internet is I don't know what you're expecting or what you've already experienced, so it's tough to compare products. (And published "tech specs" really aren't any help - on any given product these published specs can range from "mildly fudged" to "outright lies".)

So there are things like the Behringer Europort MPA40 or the Behringer Eurolive that combine a mixer and powered speaker in one unit, or you could go with a small Yamaha or Mackie or Behringer mixer plus a speaker like the Behringer Eurolive B212; add another $40 - $100 for microphones and stands and some cables, and you could have something within or close to your budget.

But it's impossible to know how you think those would compare with what you've already heard out of the Songtrix system, so IMO this is kind of a situation where you should do some shopping around in person in brick-and-mortar stores (again, musical instrument stores are the first place I would look for this kind of gear, not home electronics stores), try some stuff out and see if buying a mixer & speakers is the way you want to go for a home-brew karaoke system.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:02 AM on October 27, 2015 [1 favorite]