Singing has always been a dormant passion of mine as it never got anywhere except in the bathrooms and at times at karaokes like KBox once in a while with friends and relatives.   A few months ago, I went around enquiring what it took to set up the karaoke set on top on the home theatre system which we had now.  Prices like S$3000-$5000 was quoted for a system with one microphone for the low range price and 2 microphones towards the higher end price range.  And most of all, it is inconvenient to install because it seems that we need to buy separate speakers.  Making such a major decision of shifting the speakers and all would have to consult the man in the family and needs his help to check all equipment would function well after the installation.  Sounds too troublesome for us....so it became an idea to be shelved.

Then last week I read about this "Magic Sing" which was like a godsend equipment that suited my needs and it was under S$1000 with songs included!   I dashed down to buy it this weekend and was glad I did not do it last weekend as the stock was sold out!!

Now after setting it up and had a go at it yesterday, it was certainly a perfect gadget for my family.  The setup was in less than 5 minutes  (all required batteries are included) and off we sang to our hearts' content.

What we got and what we like about the gadget:

1. Portability

It comes in a neat cosmetics-pouch looking bag, very cool to carry around.  

Model ET-18000

2.  Wired versus Wireless

There are 2 types of system, the wired one and the cordless one.  We bought the cordless because I did not want my clumsy kid to trip over any wires when she got overly aglow with singing.

3. Language Versions 

There is an English version versus a Chinese version for the cordless.  They built-in the songs into the system which I believe is stored in the base of the cordless system.  We chose the Chinese version.

The English version has 2070 songs.  You can check out the English song list here: http://www.ktskaraoke.com/et18000.html

The Chinese version has almost 7800 songs!  Now you know why we bought this?  

It consists of all kinds of genre, Chinese, Cantonese, Hokkien and Children's Songs.  Now if you are very into latest Chinese pop hits, then you may be disappointed.  For me, my memory collection of hits stops at about 2005 or 2006?  If you like many current songs from FIR, SHE, 蔡依林,孙燕姿,周杰伦...then you may be disappointed because each of them has less than 5 songs in the collection.   I am more for the era of 林忆莲, 王菲, 张信哲,张学友, even 邓丽君 etc... and there are more than enough songs for me to select to sing.

My all-time- favourite Cantonese hit by 陈百强, "偏偏喜欢你" is also found in there to my surprise actually!    I suspect this offer of 7800 songs collection is only offered in Singapore because when I search on the Net for the song list to publish here, the only Chinese song chip available consists of only 1800+ songs.   So this is indeed a sweet deal for CNY locally.  Each song comes up to about $0.10! 

Another point to note, the songs are arranged in alphabetical order for English and in Hanyu Pinyin order for Chinese songs.  So there is no alternative to search via singer.

There are additional chips I can buy to add on the English songs, however, I do not like the genre arrangement now even though the spread is quite wide, including Christian songs.  I will buy the add on when there is a suitable new one out.  The existing ones only have limited songs(100-200+ songs) within each genre.   Well, it has many other languages like Spanish, Tagalog, Hindi etc... 

4.  Usage Fun and Not-so-fun

We like the scoring feature, it is motivating as it is reflected as you sing.   It may not be actually an accurate function but it does make it more interesting singing especially for the children.  The other fun thing is the colour coding for singing tutor function. Green color if you are too fast or too slow. Blue color if your pitch is too low. Red if your pitch is too high. Black if you are in perfect sync.   So you can really know how good or how bad you are singing.  The song quality of the microphones are also pretty good.  The other fun part which we have not tried is that we can upload our own background pictures of our children's photos, for instance, and run as a slide show behind the lyrics.  There is a software provided to download that.  You can also mark out the common songs you like to sing and put on reserved list.

What may not be fun is for the Chinese version(not sure about the English), most of the songs are not multiplex, this means that there is no original singer singing, we have to figure out the singing ourselves. 

All in all, this new toy can indeed give our family a boisterous time in front of the TV and that will purportedly help the family to bond as well amidst all the hilarious laughter and screaming voices.  Certainly the mobility of the cosmetic pouch which we can take anywhere enhance and broaden the social ability for us as we have now plans to go to a few places and lugging this with us, even overseas!!