The 5 Best Karaoke Machines for 2025
Top pick
The Ikarao Shell S1 10.1-inch Smart Karaoke Machine is the only karaoke machine we’ve tested that has absolutely everything you need to get a party going, all in one convenient carrying case that doubles as a speaker. And we do mean everything: The Ikarao even comes with a built-in touchscreen tablet screen for lyrics. That means you and your friends can go out into the middle of the woods and still sing your hearts out—which you might actually need to do, because this thing gets pretty loud. But don’t worry; the roughly 10-hour battery life will get you through the night.
The Ikarao’s built-in 10.1-inch tablet comes with multiple karaoke apps automatically installed, making it easy to find the songs you want to sing. Right out of the box, the Ikarao comes pre-loaded with YouTube, along with music-only services like Spotify and several dedicated karaoke apps including Smule and KaraFun (the latter of which comes with a free six-month subscription). It’s almost like buying a new tablet to use as a dedicated media server, complete with its own speaker.
It barely requires any setup either. All you have to do is turn it on, get onto the Wi-Fi, and the Ikarao is ready to rock right out of the box. There’s no need to worry about finding the right cables or crawling behind the TV set to plug something in. You may have to deal with the standard annoying login ritual if you want to get access to your personal Spotify library, though.
The Ikarao is also more portable than other karaoke machines we tested. It charges by USB-C, which is easy enough to find, and the mics charge automatically when you place them back inside of the machine, so you don’t have to worry as much about them cutting out in the middle of a song. Everything packs up neatly in one convenient case that weighs less than 12 pounds, which makes it light enough for kids to wrangle, too. It even comes with a carrying strap. No joke: My 4-year-old likes to sling it over his shoulder and walk around the block with the music blasting, recruiting the other kids for their own karaoke party.
It comes with a wide range of other audio inputs, too, as well as an HDMI port. There’s an aux-in port for your iPod (or whatever), plus a USB-C and standard USB input for flash drives and other storage, plus a separate ⅛-inch TRS input for an external microphone or other line-level instrument. But I found the HDMI output to be the most useful, because it allowed me to plug the 10.1-inch Ikarao into my TV, giving me a larger screen and making it easier for my friends to follow along as I fumbled through that really fast Barenaked Ladies song.
The speaker sounds pretty good, too. With a pair of 1-inch tweeters, a beefy pair of 3.5-inch subs, and up to 280 watts of output, the Ikarao is loud. We wouldn’t quite recommend spending this much money if you just plan on using the Ikarao as a portable Bluetooth speaker. But it definitely has the quality of a decent Bluetooth speaker (which is still a huge improvement over most of the other home karaoke machines we tested).
But the microphones themselves can be a little frustrating. The narrow, unidirectional diaphragms on the microphones means you really have to make sure you’re singing into them at the exact right angle and distance. The volume of your voice fluctuates at the slightest shift. The good news is, each mic has its own onboard volume control, so your singers can adjust themselves as needed. The bad news is, there’s no master volume control or limiter either, so there’s nothing stopping them from cranking their voices all the way up to 11, leaving the host scrambling to find the manual volume override controls on the touchscreen interface. Admittedly, this may be more of a problem with young children than it is with adults—but oof, it can be ear-piercing.
The touchscreen on the Ikarao can also be slow and glitchy. The tablet runs on AndroidOS with 32 GB of onboard storage—which might be fine for the occasional web browsing but tends to clog up after so much multimedia streaming. There is a built-in memory cleanup feature, which helps a little bit. But you really need to stay on top of it.
The light show is pretty disappointing, too. Most of the karaoke machines we’ve tested have placed their LED displays along the speaker grille, or around the speaker cones themselves. But the Ikarao limits its light show to a ring of roughly 2-inches in diameter that surrounds the main volume dial. That’s it. That little ring certainly changes color, but it’s hardly a party starter on its own. The tablet screen can help to augment that by adding in some fun flashes of color. But it’s still not the same as having, say, a dedicated disco ball on top like the Tonor or the Singsation.
The process of re-logging into all of your accounts (Spotify, YouTube, and so on) can also be annoying. This can obviously be an issue any time you buy a new tablet or other device. But it’s made worse by the already glitchy tablet, which tends to get overwhelmed by pop-up windows and two-factor authentication. Once you’re in, though, you should be good to rock.
