There are also spots for you to plug in the microphone and your earphones/headphones, through which the mix of the music and your vocals will be played back to you. There’s an AC adapter that provides power to the interface unit, and also a cord to connect the interface to a PC, music player, or radio via its earphone jack, through which your karaoke session’s background music will be pulled. ▼ The microphone’s unusual looks are so that the cup can cover your mouth while singing, and there’s a layer of foam sound insulation on the inner surface too. A nice-quality microphone by itself can set you back 10,000 yen, and the set also includes an audio interface unit, something that can easily cost 5,000 yen even for used examples. Seiji found the kit on Amazon for 7,800 yen (US$73), and while that may put it out of your instant-impulse-buy price range, it’s still an impressive value. It’s called the Hitori de Karoke DX, or “One-Person Karaoke Deluxe.” It’s not the solo singing that’s the real draw here, though, but that the device promises to let you sing with a full-sized voice while muffling the sound enough so that it doesn’t disturb others.

Unfortunately, living in a compact Tokyo apartment means Seiji is always in pretty close proximity to his neighbors, but he stumbled across a way that would hopefully allow him to sing to his heart’s content without also getting on his neighbors’ nerves. However, with the pandemic now causing production delays and a sudden drop in the amount of new anime content coming out, Seiji needs to find other ways to keep himself entertained, and so he’s turned to his other passion: music. After all, even when going out was an option, a day on the couch working through his backlog of recently recorded anime episodes always sounded like a pretty good time to his otaku ears. We test out the One-Person Karaoke Deluxe.Īs the biggest anime fan on our staff, our Japanese-language reporter Seiji Nakazawa has been coping fairly well with the need to stay home during the coronavirus outbreak.

Japanese karaoke