Breakaway-enabled Karaoke Jukebox

I had a furniture carpenter custom make the cabinet. I told him what needed to go in and where, but gave him pretty much free hands in designing it. Came out nice I think, very different from western style 😉. Total cost of the finished cabinet including wood, speaker cabinet and carpenter’s fee: $600. Gotta love Thailand 😉.

Indeed — and I am 🙂. Three breakaway cores. One for music, one for mic 1, one for mic 2, and nothing on the mixdown! (tried it — didn’t sound good).
Not BBP though, it’s a special Breakaway development build I call AsioKaraoke (not very imaginative).

AsioKaraoke doesn’t have much of a gui (just standard black-on-grey windows dialog), but it’s never shown on the screen, the song selector interface is fullscreen.

So how’s the audio?

Fine, thanks 🙂. Turned out 12 bands of PEQ was not enough to completely flatten the speakers, so thanks to that, Breakaway Live release is getting delayed a little while I put more PEQ bands in. I figured, others will need it, and it didn’t make sense to make it an upsell feature, because it’s cheap crappy speakers that need more EQ, and the one who buys cheap crappy speakers wouldn’t buy the upsell version anyway. Might as well throw it in.

With proper EQ’ing though (ended up using about 20 bands of PEQ!), it sounds freaking awesome. Crystal clear, basically reference quality. The woofer box is 420 liters, ports tuned to 45hz, and plays down to 35 or so before it drops below usable range.

The tweeters are mounted really high up, so that they’re not causing ear damage to whoever is standing in front of the jukebox selecting songs. Because of that, the audio is not very good if you stand right in front of it, because of the big distance separation between tweeters and woofers.. However, stand 3 meters away, and the sound from the woofers and tweeters meld together to form a coherent image, with surprisingly good stereo separation considering the near proximity of the left and right channels. Perhaps I should write that stereo enhancer and see what happens 🙂.

So, why did I build a jukebox?

Well, just for fun really. A guy’s gotta have some fun right? 🙂 Really, I don’t need the business, I have my hands completely full with everything else, but it’s fun to do something locally — all my other business is overseas, and karaoke is extremely popular in Asia as you may know. For anything that involves good sound, count me in 🙂. So, I’m not selling this jukebox, will just keep it at home as a showroom example.

Inside the jukebox is a 2x200w (RMS) PA amplifier, an Edirol FA-101 interface (although an EMU Tracker Pre would do just as well), and a Celeron E1200 computer with 512mb ram, XP embedded, UFD boot drive and 1TB HDD for music storage.

The coin acceptor is hooked up to the computer through the parallel port, accepts 1, 2, 5 and 10 baht coins, and the price at the house is set to 1 baht per song which is about 3 cents 🙂!

The USB keypad for song selection has the keycaps moved so that 123 is on top and 789 is at the bottom (like on a telephone) with corresponding remapping inside my software.

Well.. Time I drill some holes and install the Volume Up/Volume Down/Cancel Song buttons and MIC jacks 🙂.

///Leif

Implementing it into Breakaway Live is a definite possibility. In fact, all I’d have to do would be to add a software mixer to the 2, 3 and 4 instance versions, so that you could get all the processed inputs out through the primary output, which has the speaker eq section. I would then make a simple Mixer API available so that you could for example control microphone on/off from another program running on the same machine, just like i’m doing with the AsioKaraoke prototype app.

Interesting idea, and not too difficult. I might just do that, and switch to running BreakawayLive myself. 🙂

///Leif

Replaced the photos above. Added black cloth in the bass ports, so you don’t see the white padding inside. Made a big difference 🙂.

Also, the computer is now completely done.

It’s a Celeron E1200 computer, and it boots in 31 seconds, measured from the time I plug the cable in, to when the user interface is ready to use!

It also needs no shutdown — it’s fine to just pull the power cable. In fact, I’ve tested several times, inserting a coin and then pulling the power cable only 1 second after… and it still remembers the coin when it boots up again!

Windows XP Embedded, on a cheap 2gb usb stick… Can’t beat it 🙂.

///Leif