3 weeks ago
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You have a voice, and you deserve to let it out, as much as others may wish you wouldn’t. Budget TV brand Vizio is telling consumers that they can get the karaoke room experience and annoy their neighbors at the same time. The company’s new MicMe is a combo of Vizio’s existing soundbar technology and an external mic station for when you or—more likely—your children want to fill the entire house with yet another rendition of Hot to Go!
The $350 MicMe sports a white finish, but it bears a semblance to the company’s 2.1 Soundbar from earlier this year. Like that product, MicMe also comes with a relatively small wireless subwoofer. The big reason you would get this over another soundbar is for the separate microphone stand. It includes two wireless stick mics and a charging base station.
© Image: Vizio Vizio said that when you pick up one of the microphones, the soundbar immediately switches to karaoke mode, playing sound from the TV and the microphone. You can adjust the microphones and soundbar settings individually through the Vizio app. This means you can adjust pitch correction, add echo effects, and change the color of the stick mic’s LEDs. Like Vizio’s other soundbars, the white MicMe supports Dolby Atmos and DTS:X.
The TV maker is promoting its Karaoke app for iOS and Android. For this, Vizio is taking its song selection from the music streaming app Stingray. There are 80,000+ tracks on Vizio’s karaoke app, but of course, you can use it with any other music streaming service like YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Music. I have personal experience singing on Apple Music’s pseudo karaoke feature, and I suggest you cover your ears if you dare to listen to the end result.
Judging from the browser-based Stingray Karaoke site, the current music genre selection on the app isn’t very extensive, with included genres like “Pop,” “Rock,” or “Christian.” There’s a whole section just for Disney songs and more from movie soundtracks like The Barbie Movie and The Greatest Showman.
Each stick mic is supposed to have around eight hours of battery life, but it’s not like your microphones will be straying far from their base station. If you can spend a full workday doing nothing but singing tunes in front of your TV, you’re living a truly idealized life.
The soundbar should work with any other TV connected through eARC HDMI, though, of course, Vizio is promoting it for its own televisions. The MicMe is compatible with the attachment points in the base of Vizio TVs, which the company calls its “QuickFit” system.
I had positive feelings about Vizio’s $170 2.1 Soundbar and thought it had a good enough bass sound to fill a living room for its price. I can’t yet say if the MicMe will have the same sound quality as the 2.1, but for $350, you have to be sure you or your family will make use of the separate stick mics. Don’t say I didn’t warn you if your children start belting out Let it Go over and over for hours until you eventually want to let the soundbar go out the window.
The $350 MicMe will start shipping around the end of November.
