I'm JP, one of the founders of Seratone.
The thing that pushed me here wasn't a spec sheet or a whitepaper. It was karaoke.
I've tried, many times, to make karaoke work properly at home. And it almost never did.
Sometimes it was latency, enough lag to make singing feel disconnected and frustrating. Other times it was the sound itself: thin, low-quality backing tracks that stripped the life out of songs I actually love.
What should have been fun kept turning into disappointment.
That stuck with me.
I've been a musician my whole life — guitar, bass, vocals. I've worked as a live sound engineer, and for the past 15 years I've gone deep down the audiophile rabbit hole as a hobbyist.
I've also lived in Japan for the past 12+ years. Karaoke there isn't a novelty, it's culture. When something is that ingrained, people immediately notice when the experience feels off. Timing matters. Sound quality matters. Effortlessness matters.
Living in that environment sharpened my sensitivity to what wasn't working at home.
And it reinforced something I've learned over and over again:
Great sound isn't about specs. It's about emotion.
If the timing feels wrong, if the tone feels flat, if the system gets in your way, it doesn't matter how impressive the hardware is. You disengage. You stop singing. You stop playing.
Most home karaoke solutions miss this entirely.
Latency is still a problem. Connectivity options are surprisingly limited. Some systems risk damaging your speakers. Others cost far more than they should for what they deliver. And almost all of them feel like they were designed either for professionals or for nobody in particular.
What didn't exist was something simple:
hi-fi sound quality, access to modern apps, and a device intuitive enough that my kid could use it without help.
So we decided to build it.
Seratone exists because we wanted karaoke to actually work at home.
Not as a novelty. Not as a toy. But as something that feels immediate, musical, and good, the way it's supposed to feel when you sing with other people.
When sound is right, you stop thinking about the system and start paying attention to each other. That's the bar we're building toward.
And once you start designing around human experience, timing, emotion, ease, and a lot of "normal" audio trade-offs stop making sense.
I don't listen one way, and I don't think anyone else does either.
Sometimes it's headphones. Sometimes it's speakers. Sometimes it's focused listening, and sometimes it's just music in the background while life happens. The point isn't the setup, it's that good sound should adapt to the moment, not demand your attention.
That belief runs through everything we're building.
Which brings me back to the original question.
Singing at home should be easy. It should feel natural. And yet, for a lot of people, it doesn't happen at all.
What's stopped you from singing at home with your friends and family?
That's where Seratone starts, and it's what we'll keep exploring here.