I always thought the Karaoke system is kind fancy and have never thought of building one myself. But recently, To my surprise, I just found that building a home Karaoke system myself isn’t that hard.
The system can be broken down into the following pieces, starting from your hand holding microphones:
Microphone (Behringer Xm8500)
Typically, to achieve similar quality, wireless mics are of a magnitude pricer than wired ones. Of course, you may not like the tangled cables. But unless you are doing it very frequently, it might not worth the price.
Actually, for amateurs like me, a good microphone is often the bottleneck of a Karaoke system.
I chose Behringer Xm8500, which often pretty good vocal experience. Another higher end choice is Shure SM58 if it is within your budget.
Mixer (YAMAHA MG06X 6-Input)
Mixer is the machines that mix your voice from the microphone with the music you want to sing with. It may looks intimidating and professional, but what is does is literally “mixing” your voice and the music. Of course, depending on the mixer, it can have many toggles but it doesn’t really have to be.
Note - to achieve good Karaoke feeling, pick a mixer with “effects” such as vocal/delay. Many mixers are not designed specifically for Karaoke and without such effects, you may notice missing something important.
Music/video inputs
As mentioned above, the music input will be sent to the mixer. For Karaoke, music often comes with video with lyrics. The simplest source is Youtube. Or if you want a bit more “Karaoke” flavor, you can also try some Apps (e.g. 全民K歌 for chinese songs). You can use Chromecast/Fire Stick, or various Android TV sticks.
TV
The video input will be sent to TV of course.
Amplifier
The mixed audio signal from Mixer will be sent to Amplifier (Amp), and the “amplified” signal will be sent to speakers.
HDMI audio splitter
This is probably optional, depending your setup. In my case, the Amp is located far away from the TV, so I have to strip the audio signal from Chromecast, while the video signal will be sent to the TV.
And a bunch accessories:
- Foam Mic Covers
- XLR Male to XLR Female
- And likely you will need other cables (such as 3.5mm audio cable) depending on your amp and mixer.
The overall connection layout is like this:
A modified layout
If you have Amp and TV located close enough, you might not need the HDMI connector. In this case, the TV sick is directly inserted to the TV and the audio signal is sent to the mixer from TV.
Just to check the audio output ports available in your TV first. My TV only has an optical audio ouput port, so I will need another optical to analog converter.
