I had that thought a couple times before. The last one occurred some 5 years ago when we moved into this new house of ours and were installing a built-in audio/video system. I did some research but found it a bit complicated and pricier than I thought and ended up not pursuing it.
But I like singing and lately we had a bunch of music loving friends coming over for party, thus the thought crept up on me again.
A quick survey online showed a full-blown commercial karaoke system with mixer, microphones, speakers, etc. still looks unwieldy and can cost up to $1000 or more, not to mention the installation hassle. With my intuitive belief that consumer electronics pricing is constantly going downward and new technologies should help make setting up things easier, I went on to explore alternative solutions for a simple karaoke system with decent performance at reasonable cost that I can build on my own.
One of the first low-end karaoke equipment I found online was some all-in-one "karaoke microphone" that combines microphone and speaker in one little hand-held piece that transmits the music through bluetooth wireless and shows lyrics on your smartphone or tablet screen, for about $30. I bought one for trial. It worked as it said, except its tiny platform and limited power were more suited for self-practice and close-up groups than the grander scheme of things I have in mind.
Continuing searching from bottom-up, I found this other simple package: a mixer with two wireless microphones, that costs just a little over $60:
I got it in two days with Amazon Prime shipping and got right on to it. The mixer was a tiny box but looked solid and sturdy. The hook-up was easy in theory: Pair it with your iPhone/Android or iPad/tablet through bluetooth wireless for the music input, and connect its audio output to your existing audio system for the back end. It's the latter that would take me some work-around to do, for I have a somewhat complicated (don't we all nowadays) home entertainment system that includes 9 ceiling/wall speakers, one big screen TV, DVD, Blu-ray players, FM/internet radios, a now-defunct cable/satellite TV input, divided into two zones, wrapped around a slew of receiver, amplifier, master console boxes, etc.
It took some analytical thinking, and a few trial and error fumblings with the wires, but I got it right eventually, and tapped the audio output to my 5 ceiling speakers in the family room. It's a pleasant and triumphant feeling hearing those nice, clear surrounding sounds coming out from the front and back of the room again, a couple years after I terminated my satellite TV service that simultaneously cut off those speakers due to the original wiring design by my A/V system installer!
The bluetooth pairing was easy and almost automatic, found its connection with my Android device the moment it's turned on. Same were those two wireless microphones, connecting instantly with the mixer, with impressive volume and echo controls!
Then came one last sticky point of the hardware setup: Instead of having people reading lyrics from one tiny smartphone or tablet, I want to connect the music video to my TV so all people--the audience and the singer--can see the lyrics and the video on the big screen while singing. How do I do that?
The easy solution was to hook up my Android device--the one that was hooked up with the mixer wirelessly already--with my Chromecast dongle attached to my TV, also wirelessly. What I found, unfortunately, was once that Android device was connected with the TV through Chromecast wirelessly (WiFi), it lost its wireless (bluetooth) connection with the mixer's audio output, or those precious 5-speaker surround sounds coming from my room ceiling. Bummer!
Fortunately, I have an old Android tablet that has an HDMI port that can connect directly, through wire, to my TV, and such wired connection won't destroy the audio connection from the mixer to those speakers. Problem solved!
Hardware all hooked up, now comes the soft side of things, i.e., where and how do I get the karaoke music content to sing along with?
Here is where the beauty and omnipresence of today's internet technology come into play: There are plenty of (free) apps with plenty of karaoke music to choose from online. I downloaded and tried out a couple of them. App 1 has good song selections and quality sound effect, except it has incessant ad interruptions that's borderline intolerable and the song selections are somewhat limited; App 2 is really a YouTube layover, getting all its songs through YouTube search for you, and has longer than usual streaming latency that could choke up the songs badly.
So why not go directly to YouTube for the music, I said to myself, and I did. YouTube has a fantastic trove of karaoke music videos: English, Chinese, love songs, pop songs, oldies, contemporaries... you name it, you probably can find it. They are from people who love singing, apparently, and some karaoke music production houses that want to attract people to subscribe or buy and download their stuff. I easily collected over 50 karaoke music videos I like through random search on YouTube during my spare time in a couple of days.
YouTube does push ads between songs too. If you are a singing purist and want absolutely no interruptions between songs, you can sign up with their paid service, YouTube Red, for $9.99/month. Not only will that eliminate all ads, it allows you to download the music videos to your device, so you can play them offline, not worrying about internet connection or any signal hick-up whatsoever. You can terminate the service any time you want, and keep the videos you've downloaded for your permanent karaoke collection, I suppose.
So my friends, I hope I have not bored you to death with all these mumble jumble, techie nonsense--they are not important. What's important, is you tell me what songs you like to sing, and I'll find and save them for you, and we'll sing them together next time you are in my home!
I got it in two days with Amazon Prime shipping and got right on to it. The mixer was a tiny box but looked solid and sturdy. The hook-up was easy in theory: Pair it with your iPhone/Android or iPad/tablet through bluetooth wireless for the music input, and connect its audio output to your existing audio system for the back end. It's the latter that would take me some work-around to do, for I have a somewhat complicated (don't we all nowadays) home entertainment system that includes 9 ceiling/wall speakers, one big screen TV, DVD, Blu-ray players, FM/internet radios, a now-defunct cable/satellite TV input, divided into two zones, wrapped around a slew of receiver, amplifier, master console boxes, etc.
It took some analytical thinking, and a few trial and error fumblings with the wires, but I got it right eventually, and tapped the audio output to my 5 ceiling speakers in the family room. It's a pleasant and triumphant feeling hearing those nice, clear surrounding sounds coming out from the front and back of the room again, a couple years after I terminated my satellite TV service that simultaneously cut off those speakers due to the original wiring design by my A/V system installer!
The bluetooth pairing was easy and almost automatic, found its connection with my Android device the moment it's turned on. Same were those two wireless microphones, connecting instantly with the mixer, with impressive volume and echo controls!
Then came one last sticky point of the hardware setup: Instead of having people reading lyrics from one tiny smartphone or tablet, I want to connect the music video to my TV so all people--the audience and the singer--can see the lyrics and the video on the big screen while singing. How do I do that?
The easy solution was to hook up my Android device--the one that was hooked up with the mixer wirelessly already--with my Chromecast dongle attached to my TV, also wirelessly. What I found, unfortunately, was once that Android device was connected with the TV through Chromecast wirelessly (WiFi), it lost its wireless (bluetooth) connection with the mixer's audio output, or those precious 5-speaker surround sounds coming from my room ceiling. Bummer!
Fortunately, I have an old Android tablet that has an HDMI port that can connect directly, through wire, to my TV, and such wired connection won't destroy the audio connection from the mixer to those speakers. Problem solved!
Hardware all hooked up, now comes the soft side of things, i.e., where and how do I get the karaoke music content to sing along with?
Here is where the beauty and omnipresence of today's internet technology come into play: There are plenty of (free) apps with plenty of karaoke music to choose from online. I downloaded and tried out a couple of them. App 1 has good song selections and quality sound effect, except it has incessant ad interruptions that's borderline intolerable and the song selections are somewhat limited; App 2 is really a YouTube layover, getting all its songs through YouTube search for you, and has longer than usual streaming latency that could choke up the songs badly.
So why not go directly to YouTube for the music, I said to myself, and I did. YouTube has a fantastic trove of karaoke music videos: English, Chinese, love songs, pop songs, oldies, contemporaries... you name it, you probably can find it. They are from people who love singing, apparently, and some karaoke music production houses that want to attract people to subscribe or buy and download their stuff. I easily collected over 50 karaoke music videos I like through random search on YouTube during my spare time in a couple of days.
YouTube does push ads between songs too. If you are a singing purist and want absolutely no interruptions between songs, you can sign up with their paid service, YouTube Red, for $9.99/month. Not only will that eliminate all ads, it allows you to download the music videos to your device, so you can play them offline, not worrying about internet connection or any signal hick-up whatsoever. You can terminate the service any time you want, and keep the videos you've downloaded for your permanent karaoke collection, I suppose.
So my friends, I hope I have not bored you to death with all these mumble jumble, techie nonsense--they are not important. What's important, is you tell me what songs you like to sing, and I'll find and save them for you, and we'll sing them together next time you are in my home!
Try this one for starters:
No comments:
Post a Comment