In the years CD-i was sold, Philips put significant energy into promoting karaoke. Mainly popular in Asia, with the launch of CD+Graphics it was possible to support audio with graphics to show the lyrics and other art, allowing people to sing along with it. Karaoke is a lot more fun when your voice is amplified on the same level as the music. Philips recognized this and developed the the Philips Karaoke Mixer 22ER9060, which was the
official Karaoke device for Philips CD-i players. The mixer was only connected to the audio channels, so it was also suitable to connect it to laserdisc and VHS karaoke content/players as long as the player offered separate audio connectors to mix the sound.
As Philips CD-i supported
CD+Graphics discs that were used for karaoke, this was already a popular
genre on CD-i. Later, there were several CD-i titles released
specifically aimed at karaoke, mainly because the graphics on CD-i could
be in higher resolution and more animation was possible on the CD-i
format. And, as most karaoke discs were used on a CD-i player anyway,
Philips saw a chance to support this even better on CD-i.
After 1993, Karaoke discs sometimes were issued on Video CD's, to offer full motion video. The lyrics in that case were integrated in the video stream. Did
you know that Karaoke-CD is the old name of the Video-CD standard? It
dates back to 1993 when the standard was defined by Philips and JVC, and
the support of Sony and Matsushita was not yet there (they joined some
time later when the name was changed into Video-CD and the version
number of the spec was increased to 1.1). Karaoke-CD was -as its name
already says- mainly intended for karaoke applications in Japan. The
system uses MPEG-1 audio and video, and is based on the CD-i Bridge
specification. Therefore, Karaoke-CDs are playable on CD-i players.
Even today, I found the karaoke mixer a nice and quality mixer for any karaoke party you want to have, with or without CD-i. As it was always promoted in the same folders as CD-i and it follows the same catalogue numbers as the CD-i range of products, the Karaoke mixer is related as a CD-i accessory, although in principle it is possible to use it as a stand alone product. If you ever find one, we recommend you to buy it!
With this karaoke mixer, you can connect three microphones and all channels can be mixed separately.
[Thanks, Lenferdes]