Hoover, Panasonic and Eureka are all three highly designed and trustworthy vacuums? You have got to be kidding yourself. And the dirt finders are a joke whether it be the microphone or light sensor. And by the way, the Kirby Generation models do clean better than the older models, they have a better designed brushroll that has more aggressive agitation and they have better airflow as well. While I believe the Kirby is overpriced, it has way more airflow than the other vacuums you mentioned and will clean cirlcles around Filter Queen, Rainbow, Panasonic, etc! when it comes to vacuuming carpet. Having said that, it is terrible as a shampooer as all it does is brush soap into your carpet leaving a residue that attracts dirt. Those that use the Kirby shampooer regularly have tons of soap in their carpet which you will notice if you bring in a quality extractor because there will be tons of suds. It is also not a user friendly vacuum as it is hard for most to hook up the attachments. Also,the newer bags do hold dust better than the older single ply bags so they have improved in filtration as well. I wouldnt buy a Kirby new at the price they get for them and I would never use one to shampoo my carpet. But they do a great job of vacuuming carpet which is really all they were designed for in the first place. Shampooer and the other gadgets were added on to try and add value to the machine. And for those of you that didnt know it, Hoover is now owned by Dirt Devil so when you buy a Hoover these days, you are really buying a chinese made Dirt Devil with the Hoover name on it. At least the Kirby is American made

The Audio-Technica looks decent. You'll have to feed its signal into whatever is amplifying the CD player. Then my question is if whatever that amplifier is could have both the CD player and the microphone "live" at the same time (assuming that's something you want to do). You also need to consider how you're going to amplify and voice the microphone sound for rugby games (since everything would need to be battery- or generator-powered). I am not very familiar with karaoke machines, but I've linked to search results for "karaoke" at a company that I've purchased from several times over the years. Those listings might answer some questions for you (and raise some others). Here is a link that might be useful: J&R listings for karaoke

Each microphone would need to transmit on a separate channel and you'd need a 5 channel receiver, otherwise the RF would interfere with each other. I think 5x the background noise (conversations,ect) would be too much to listen to.

I hate those ball things. They're like biting into rocks. I vote sprinkles! For the cones, I think I'd either make a waffle cone or more likely just go with the regular sugar cone. It's actually closer to a real microphone than a chocolate color would be. Yes there's a few black microphones often with yellow windscreens but most professional mics are that "gunmetal" color, gray-like. And for another effect, I'd go one step farther and put some black licorice whips on the cones for a mic cord.