So the component itself and remote are great. Great features and ways to adjust the echo, pitch, etc... A huge miss for me is that I felt like there was a bait and switch. The photos in the product listing made it look like the 2 microphones were cordless. They are corded! Really long cords, but corded. I wouldn't have bought it had that been more clear...or at least looked for a less expensive version that didn't include the microphones. Oh well. You can by a separate microphone component and it'll be fine. More expensive, but fine.

We have had our player for a little over a year now and it's been a fantastic machine. Unfortunately, we had a power surge while we were on vacation and, even though it was plugged into a Back-UPS, the player glitched out for a couple of days. The digital LED screen was completely glitching out, which made the player unusable. On a whim, I left it powered on all day yesterday and it seems to work the glitches out and now the player works again. I'm now buying a backup machine, just in case!

On to the review . . .

I did a lot of research on karaoke players. I really wanted one that I could just plug into my Denon receiver and use my wireless microphone package to sing along with. This one has HDMI and other features that I liked, so I purchased it.

When it arrived, I hooked it up and it worked . . . except the HDMI was very glitchy. Any time I changed disks, it would stop sending a video signal. I had to physically go up to the machine, unplug the HDMI cord and plug it back in (sometimes I did this on the Denon) just to get the video back up and running. After about a month of that, I gave up and connected the Red, Green, Blue component cables and I haven't had a problem since.

Ripping disks at 8x speed is great! Unfortunately, as someone else mentioned, it just saves the files as "Track 1", "Track 2" etc. (and two of each file! .mp3 and .cdg, I believe) which meant a painstaking trip to the computer at the end of each rip session to change all the tracks into their proper titles and artists. Not really a problem for me, but it could be a pain for others.

The sound quality is excellent (I have it running through an optical cable into the Denon receiver.) It really sounds great! The pitch adjustments work flawlessly, the echo can be turned completely off, if you wish, and the microphone inputs work great.

There is a "scoring system" that can be activated in the menus. My wife and I are still confused of how it actually works. One time we will sing a song flawlessly and it will give a score of 64 and the next song we'll sing just really poorly and it will give a score of 97. There's a part of me that believes the scoring is totally random. Another part of me thinks the scoring is based on the number of words you sing into the microphone, since most short songs get lower scores and longer songs/songs with a lot of lyrics tend to get high scores. It's not explained at all in the manual, so I'm just guessing on this.

This machine plays pretty much anything you throw at it. However, I had some trouble with any files I downloaded off of Youtube or elsewhere. I'd try to play an mp4 and it failed to recognize. It also failed to recognize .avi files, which I thought confusing since the manual says that they work. In order to get them to work, I had to download off of youtube, save the file as an mp4, put the file into Vegas Movie Maker and make it into a DVD, and then take the .vob file it creates and put it onto my external hard drive. (Sometimes, I had to take the mp4 file and put it into Handbreak and convert it into a different mp4 file because sometimes the Vegas Movie Maker would crash if using the mp4 file I downloaded off of youtube. Why? I have no idea.) It's a longer process than it should be but it's what I found to work after MUCH trial and error with various formats of files off youtube.

One note about the remote control that got me frazzled for about 10 minutes until I figured it out: sometimes, a key might get stuck when you push it. This leave the remote inoperable until you un-stick the key. The first time it happened to me, the red LED light on the remote was going bonkers with continual flashing and I couldn't figure out what was wrong. I replaced the batteries and it continued. Finally, I looked closely and saw one of the keys that I had pressed got "stuck" inside the plastic casing so the remote was registering constant pressing of that key. Once I realized it, I got it un-stuck and now it's no big deal when it happens.

All-in-all, I love this machine. I compared a bunch of others like the Vocobox and just liked this better. A friend of mine has a big Vocobox player with built-in speakers, but I like this one because I can plug it into my home theater for much bigger sound.

I know I have a bunch of "complaints" but they are all very minor in the grand scheme.

If you're looking for a very nice karaoke PLAYER (not a machine) that you can install into your home theater setup, this is a very nice one. I recommend it!

It will take some practice to get used to all the features and the remote. But I look forward to learning it all. It also arrived a week earlier than I expected. Thank you.

Great CDG Player with great sound and graphics.

A little bit of a learning curve, for the different functions. didn't take long for me. awesome sound with even mediocre speakers. plays any CD movies, music etc. dual mic hookups for duets. beautiful stereo sound in your recorded songs, i purchased march 4 of this year, trouble free. This is an update, I have been using this machine for around 8 months and one day it would not power up, contacted the seller and they responded quickly, sent the unit to them to be repaired or replaced, all is good. Great customer service, a rare find nowadays. I own two of these and could not be happier.