Everyone loves their music. No matter where you are, what you’re doing or the mood you’re in while doing it, music just makes everything better. Which is why the Roxi Electric Jukebox exists. It’s a product that’s based around music. So if music makes everything better, why does this product just fall flat on its face?
The Roxi Electric Jukebox plugs into your television and comes with a year’s premium subscription to Music Pass, and is small enough to fit into the smallest of areas on your stand. It uses HDMI, and even has a 3.5mm aux out for audio directly into a soundbar or speaker system which I would recommend as TV speakers a so bad these days. It has a Nintendo Wii style remote to navigate menus and setup is extremely simple. The remote charges via microUSB.
It advertises four major features on the front of the box, which starts off with unlimited music streaming. Great. It then moves onto featuring karaoke, a music trivia game and a world wide radio. Okay, the radio is a neat feature but the others, I’m not so sure.
Giving the term ‘Music Pass’ a quick Google, it became clear that the service is linked to Roxi themselves. It offers unlimited music streaming, very similar to Spotify or Tidal. It comes free with the box itself for one year, and £52 annually after that. However, Music Pass isn’t available on your phone, so you’re stuck with a £52 a year bill for music on this box only. Spotify is double the price annually, but I have the freedom to use a Bluetooth speaker or headphones, my laptop or desktop or even the built-in SMART app on my Samsung TV. Spotify is everywhere! And I get podcasts too!
The music quiz is a little quirky, but got old quickly. The game is split into rounds, and you’re given multiple choices to guess the song from a 30 second clip. It was nice Christmas Day when the family was together, but after two or three rounds, people started to lose interest. There is no way you’re playing this by yourself.
The same goes for the Karaoke, where the remote turns into a microphone in which you sing along to the track… with the vocal line still present! Not at all like the experience you would get from an authentic karaoke bar. Not to mention the actual quality of your voice when singing through the device is absolutely soul destroying. It echoes so much and peaks, distorting the sound with anything other than a whisper.
The radio, which is advertised as having access to thousands of radio stations around the world again I thought was a neat feature. Because I’m in the UK, I went to the popular stations tab to see what’s trending from other countries. I was offered KCRW Santa Barbara from the USA, Flip from France, and 25 stations from the UK. There are 195 countries in the world today, surely they listen to the radio too? More variety in your selection would have been nice. Going into Genre selection was better, but still only gave me UK and USA stations first.
There’s an extra feature called Relax which offers various audio tracks to you guessed it, help you relax and get to sleep. There’s also some sounds for Yoga or meditation. These are cool, but again, can be found on a Spotify playlist.
The Roxi Electric Jukebox is retailing at £100 online, which is as much as an annual Spotify Premium subscription. If it was much cheaper, like £30 retail, then it’s a different story. But as it stands, do yourself a favour, and go with Spotify. Ignore this product, you will be sorely disappointed.
