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 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. But before we go, it's time for the Segway to our sponsor, Corsair. Their 3500x case is like a window into your soul, thanks to its wraparound glass aesthetics and

support for Back to Front motherboards. Because if you're like us, your soul is really just a bunch of PC components. Check it out today using our 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. 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 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 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 decides. Besides that, they're not worthy. Also, downloading from YouTube can be. Thankfully, there are other platforms like iTunes, 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 Beefheart. Is that 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 pro-sumer 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 happened. 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 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 thread. 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 microphone. 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 put the charging ring all the way around the base. Put them in, you just chuck them in there and then turn them off though because, oh yeah, 'cause otherwise that'll happen. But you don't have to worry about it happening to your speakers. That's true. You heard us mention karaokearlier. It's really, really cool, an 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 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 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 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 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. 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 an all-in-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 strap thing on it. Yeah, comes with the strap too. Regardless of which setup works best for you, we hope you guys learn something today. Like this message from our sponsor Vessie. The weather might be taking a turn for the worst, but that doesn't mean you can't keep your feet dry and look pretty darn good doing it too. Their Courtside Classics are giving 90s with a modern twist on a timeless design reminiscent of a vintage sneaker, not naming any names. They have a soft flexible tongue for putting them on and taking them off easier and removable insoles so you can slide in your own orthotics for that custom fit. The clean exterior also keeps the classics subtly

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Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


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