Scott Blomquist

I got an Xbox 360 message from a friend the other day telling me that my attempt at sending him a voice message sounded like 5 seconds of silence. I did some troubleshooting only to find that the tip of the headset’s connector had broken off inside one of my controllers. That really pissed me off–I was less concerned about the loss of a headset than I was about the fact that I’d forever have a piece of headset connector stuck inside one of my Xbox 360 controllers.

Turns out that my worry was for nothing. The industrial engineering minds at Microsoft seem to have designed the controllers to handle exactly this contingency. If you first remove the battery pack from the controller that has the headset piece lodged in it, and then shove in an unbroken headset connector with the controller upright, the broken off tip will fall right out.

(If you don’t have an unbroken headset, you can get one pretty cheap at Amazon. Or if you do a lot of text chat, you should consider the Text Messaging Kit, which comes with a headset. Finally, if you upgrade to a wireless headset, you won’t even have to get the broken piece out of your controller.)

I’m pretty sure that this is the problem that Shodan1028 is describing over on the Gamertag Radio forums.

Update: Fixed formatting problems, and added links to replacements for what’s broken.