Echo KTV

They have the exact same songs as the Hayward Music Studio, but this one has better lighting.

I was actually pretty excited when my friends bought me there, because I never been to a KTV in the US. The time we went there there were two people at the front, and when they asked us how many people we have, me and my friends all started to count. We thought it was funny so we laughed out loud. The guy then said, «Can you guys please be quiet?» I mean, a KTV is actually a place to have fun, not to be quiet. If you want quietness why did you open a KTV? How have you been TOLERANTING people singing?
I also lost my video camera there, and that gave me so many troubles in the future. So no fun for me.
I hate this place. I’ll never go again.

Formerly Echo KTV, this place has been renamed to Renaissance. They’ve done a good job upgrading the ambience the place and it looks much nicer and newer than before. The shift though is most noticeable in the music — they have a decent collection of songs, but I think it’s catering much more towards a Korean audience, and unfortunately I do not read/​sing Korean songs — I think this is one area where Echo was superior. We couldn’t figure out all the features on the remote and none of the songs we did had any vocal backgrounds. I will say though I found most of the songs that I wanted and that I still had a good time, it was reasonably priced — you could fit probably 9 people in the 6 person room — and in particular, I appreciate the service. I had lost something in the room the last time I went and was able to get it back thanks to the management’s help, so I had to recognize that fact and give them an extra star or two just for that alone.

Looks like they updated the look of the place. The rooms are cleaner and fancier than the other karaōke places, but it also costs a lot more too. They’re really really strict with alky at his place. We were able to sneak in a bottle, but they found our cups and took away our bottle (made us leave it in the car). The good thing, I guess, is that they do serve beer.
The English song selections were pathetic. I think this place caters to old folks.

We made reservation, showed up exactly on time, and they didnt even have our name there. 8 girls dressed for a bachelorette party… waiting in a dim parking lot for non-​existant reservations. «George» the person who took our reservation 2 weeks prior to the event) failed to write our name down. THe person behind the counter said that they had no rooms available because they had someone comin in at 930, it was about 900. So i asked if we could have the room for 30 minutes. I didnt want to disappoint the bride. In the end, we were turned away, and told they didnt really have any english songs anyways.
I think what upset me the most, is i walked back into their establishment 10 minutes after all this to ask for a bathroom, and they directed me to it, every single room i passed along the way was EMPTY. not a person in sight. except for the employees that helped us when we entered… it would have ruined our night, but luckily there was another more accomodating place less than a block away.

… eh!
we didn’t know it was sauna + singing… they didn’t turn on the air conditioner until an hour into our rental. Music selection was a little short. Virtually no Korean songs and very old Japanese songs… English, or in their case, foreign songs were ‘ok’…
When we were leaving we realized that they’re charging us to the minute… really?

First off let me say, the place was located in what looked like a pretty dead plaza. The place looked shabby and when we check out the rooms they didn’t even have an actual Tv’s they were computer screens. Even though it was 20 dollars an hour for happy hour me and my friends took a look at the place and went to another place. AIRANG Karaōke is a whole lot better, it was clean, the rooms were inviting, and even had a disco ball f

What a craptastic sound system– really, really awful, you can get more oomph from singing in the shower. Maybe that was just our room, but I kind of doubt that. The computerized song list is nice in theory, but it worked poorly and had me missing the old fashioned way of paging through books of songs.
As for song selection, there was a decent amount of Chinese pop as well as English songs, but there were very few Korean or Japanese ones.
I don’t like this place and was not impressed in the least– it was much better back in the day as World (and this was about a decade ago). Check out the other karaōke joints along El Camino before settling for this hole. I’m afraid to say that either you don’t respect karaōke, are easily pleased and/​or inebriated, or just don’t know how good karaōke can be if you actually think Echo is a nice place to sing.

There are better karaōke joints.
Echo’s first problem is that their new computer-​based system has some of the most cryptic, unintuitive menus and remote controls I’ve seen in any piece of consumer electronics. Finding a song takes lots of digging, fumbling, and restarting; selecting a new song resets the volume to whisper-​soft levels and turns the vocal track back on, every time. Sinking things further is the skimpy song selection: you’ll be lucky to find even 100 familiar English language artists, most of whom have more than half their hits missing. By the way, their bathroom has neither paper towels nor a locking door.
You’re better off going back to Gamba or Arirang.

First off, happy hour ends at 8pm. Otherwise, a small room is $ 28/​hour. All rooms are thoughtfully equiped with a disco ball and snazzy lights to give you that Americal Idol moment minus the judges. Of course, we’d all love to hear Paula’s supportive remarks and Simon’s cruel feedback. The rooms are rather bare and not all that comfy.
When getting a room, you have to sign a form that promises to pay $ 100 for any form cake throwing in the room. I don’t know how that came about. But, please try to resist the cake throwing urges, if you have any. This is not the place to be holding cake throwing championships while belting out tunes.
I do like the computerized karaōke playlist… no more riffling through sticky song folders. I don’t know about the song selections because all the Chinese songs I sing are old… from my college years. So, my only fear is that they phase out my Chinese classics in favor of the hipper new songs by the one hit wonders they launch daily in Asia.
Good place to sit and kill an hour off your evening after dinner. Aids in the food digestion.

I used to think it was the best karaōke place in the bay area but not so much anymore. I’ve been here a couple times over the past years and didn’t realize they changed ownership on my last visit.
— Difficult to use the new computer based system. The switch from book based song queuing to the computer is much more difficult. Sure, it looks nice, but its hard to fumble through. You can search by artist name, then by male/​female/​group, then awkwardly pressing non-​intuitive buttons to scroll through each page, oh what a pain.
— Almost no Japanese songs. This part was a real disappointment since my Friend was excited to come here to sing Japanese songs. We didn’t know that they changed ownership (Taiwanese owners now?). We asked the people there and they said they are still in the process of putting Japanese songs onto their computerized system. For the few Japanese songs that they did have, are the ones everybody knows. Like Utada Hikaru’s «First Love» which was in Romaji. Fun for dorks like me who don’t read Japanese, yet know the song.
— Technical Difficulties. When we got started, and finally started putting some some songs in, we realized that somebody’s been messing around with the 1) pitch. Nobody in my group knows how to handle the machine so we had to ask for help. Then we realized that somebody has been messing with the 2) speed also. So I had to step out and ask them for help. We finally started singing, and realized 3) one of the mics are going on/​off. You know how you use the headphones and it starts to break because the cable on the end is loose, and you have to jiggle it this way and that to make it work? Well that’s what we had to do with the mic. Another pain. On the good side, I complained to the attendants (whatever you call them), and they gave my group a discount. It turned out pretty cheap. 5 people for about 3 hours. 50 dollars total?!
I would come here for their Chinese and English songs. They seem to have a good collection. By good I mean they have the original music videos for the Chinese ones and they have cheezy videos of girls wearing sundresses frolic at sea towns for the English ones. For a good Japanese song selection, head over to Gamba Karaōke instead.

Been coming to this place for a while now and it recently changed owners and they’re now owned by Taiwanese people. So all the songs are really new and they’ve updated their systems to be all electronic instead of the old print outs! The speakers are still not as good as some of the Berkeley places BUT it’s probably the best local place for us wanna be singers to go for some fun karaōke after work! :)