Thanks for the advise wiseguy.wiseguy wrote:It's easy to go overboard when building your karaoke laptop. I'm guilty of this myself. I have to have the latest and greatest sound and graphics cards around. The truth is, if your only using the laptop for karaoke you are just wasting money.
The integrated sound card that comes standard in most laptops will work just fine. I don't think you will even notice any difference in your sound with a 24 bit external sound card.
A standard integrated video card with at least 128 MB video ram and extended desktop will display the CDG graphics on the laptop and remote screens just as good as the most powerful graphics card you can buy.
I recently bought my niece a refurbished Dell laptop with audio and video components like I just mentioned. Installed JustKaraoke on it and loaded her CDGs onto the internal hard drive with Power CD+G Burner. I connected it to my professional sound system and it worked and sounded just as good as my expensive laptop.
You say, "A standard integrated video card with at least 128 MB video ram and extended desktop will display the CDG graphics on the laptop and remote screens just as good as the most powerful graphics card you can buy."
Just to make sure I understand -- are you saying that the standard video card on any late model notebook will simultaneously send two different video signals to two separate monitors -- the notebook's display and an external monitor?
My wife's main concern is being able to display the video from the host program on her notebook display, perform searches, etc, while the lyrics are being displayed on the monitor(s) for the singer(s).
What about optical digital out? Seems to me like the way to go, but it sounds like the RS ground loop eliminator works well also. Either way you've got an extra box between the the notebook and the mixer.