Ladies and gentlemen, good news! The Sega Mega-CD Karaoke microphone has been repaired! It turns out that the replacement cartridge I ordered from eBay actually worked, so that’s a rather nice result for a ten-dollar part.

The original microphone cartridge was faulty, and I’d already confirmed that the rest of the unit was functioning by temporarily connecting another small microphone. That was fine for testing, but it wasn’t particularly well suited to a proper karaoke microphone. Time to install something a little more suitable.

The replacement is a 600-ohm BG-58 dynamic microphone cartridge. It’s noticeably shorter than the original, so at first I wasn’t entirely sure how well it would fit. It also came with an additional fitting that needed to be removed before the cartridge would sit correctly inside the original housing.

Once that was out of the way, fitting it was relatively straightforward. There are two solder connections to make, followed by putting the cartridge back into the microphone body and ensuring everything clips together properly.

Naturally, the microphone has a warning about opening it and voiding the warranty. I think we might be a little beyond worrying about that now!

With the microphone reassembled, it was time to hook everything back up to the Sega Mega-CD Karaoke accessory and give it a test. Microphone, microphone, microphone!

It works! Beautiful! We’ve got sound coming through, the replacement fits inside the original housing, and the microphone is once again doing what a microphone is supposed to do.

So there you have it, a lovely little Sega accessory back in action with a ten-dollar replacement cartridge. A marvellous success! I hope anyone else who needs one of these finds the information somewhere along their journey.

In other news, I received another ASUS K7-class motherboard today with a 900 MHz Athlon attached. Looking forward to testing that later in the week as well.