Karaoke Forums

Hey guys...

I'm pretty new to the whole Karaoke thing. I recently purchased a Vocopro DVG808K Dual-Deck Multi Format Player with Intergated Mixer (I wasn't sure about the rules as it pertains to posting links, so I refrained). This is only going to be used for home use (parties, entertaining, etc). That said, I want something that works well and has all the basics one would expect from a solid performing Karaoke machine. At this point, I'm not even sure what a "good" karaoke machine should do. I would imagine there are functions that help mask a really poor singing voice.

Another question I have is about the various formats. From what I can tell CD+G is the most popular format. I believe the machine I purchased uses all of the available formats, exclusing SCDG. Are there any benefits to one format over the other?

Finally, do Karaoke discs have voice tracks that are turned down, or are they all simply music and all the performer's voice? Just wondering what really makes people sound decent who really aren't great singers. Sorry if this sounds like a very basic question. As I said, I really have no experience with this and thought I'd add a system to my media room for entertainment. Any and all feedback is most appreciated. Thanks for reading my post.

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John from Boston

Some of your questions I can address, however I'll leave some of them to the far more knowledgeable posters here.

CD+G discs are the more common of the discs available. While you can still find DVD and VCD discs, they take longer to cue up and can be a real pain if you're in a hurry (espcially DVD's). SCDG's are basically a large number of MP3+G's burned to a DVD disc. I don't have any experience with them so I can't say that using them takes any longer to cue up, but I have used MP3+G and the sound quality is comparable in most cases to the orginal CD (if using 192k or better ripping).

From what I've seen of the player you mentioned it will indeed play CD+G, VCd, and DVD formats. It will NOT play the SCDG format as you mentioned.

As for the discs, my experience has been that CD+G's come either as no vocal tracks or as 'learning' tracks with the vocals recorded on the left or right channel only. These are often shown as "w/vocal" on the discs or advertised as 8+8, 5+5, etc. VCD's and DVD may have vocals on one of the two tracks which is usually turned off by turning on karaoke mode and pressing the audio button to select the track you want (at least on the 3 different DVD players I've used).

As for making a singer sound better, what a 'good' machine should do, etc. I'll defer to the more experienced posters since I'm pretty new at this myself.

www.geocities.com/akaraokelounge/define.html is a page I made up talking about the various formats of karaoke out there commercially!