I'll confess to having a Radio Shack karaoke setup. We hoped it would serve as a partial PA. We stopped using it long ago except for very limited vocal use. Made my autoharp sound like crap. But with a good mic going in (using an XLR to 1/4" Lo-Hi-Z thingie), vocals in a small area are nice with this. SO i use it in the church where the hard walls make the autoharp sound great on its own, and then the RS unit boosts my high, light vocal just enough.

On the other hand, we have two Gorilla bass amps we have used quite a bit, with omni mics to catch both voice and instrument. One is medium in size and one is very small, about 12" x 14." In small settings it has been just the thing to make us hearable in singalongs. One mic to a customer.

The RS does have one nice feature-- tape playback slowdown. So you can use it to catch tricky lyrics or fiddle tunes.

We just got a Behringer mini-mixer, it's a preamp with 2 XLR inputs and four (or more if you split the stereo inputs) 1/4". It's smaller than a piece of paper and carries in a nifty padded cardbnoard box with a carry handle. $80 US. A nice feature is that the user manual has a great picture of the control panel, so we can xerox these to make notes, to make our setups faster. For now we are going to line out from that into either my Crate acoustic amp (1 XLKR and 1 1/4"), or one of our big old guitar amps. Think of it-- mixed sound out of one powerful speaker. And you can line out to a recorder and/or monitor/headphones as well. Lighter than a portable PA and using what we already have instead of springing for a portable PA. It will all load on a folding luggage cart.

~Susan