GoodBuyGuys Blog

As someone who has owned and used wireless microphones for years and now sells lots of batteries for them, wireless mic folklore has been part of my work life for years. Recently, I had a chance to examine something that I assumed was unfounded, but turned out to actually be true.

We have sold Duracell Procell batteries for a long time and our largest user base is wireless mic owners. People had told me for years that one reason they preferred the Procell over Energizer’s Industrial line is that the Duracell Procells were slightly longer, and thus made better contact with the battery clips in the microphone transmitter.

I am holding examples of AA batteries from both manufacturers in my hand, and this is absolutely true. My assumption that all AA batteries are the same size was wrong and our customers absolutely knew what they were talking about.

We are in negotiations with another battery manufacturer now, and one of the criteria we will use when considering whether to offer their AA and AAA batteries at Buybattery.com will be how long they are.

I never cease to be amazed at what can be learned from listening to our customers.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Look to us first to meet your microphone accessory and battery needs.

Its become way too easy to keep track of what the competition is up to. If you are interested in what is being written by or about a competitor or supplier, you need to start monitoring the blogs.

Jump over to a site like Technorati and you’ll be amazed at what you might find. Sites that index blogs (like Technorati) are great equalizers. If the blog posting you are looking for has been keyword enriched, then the writings of a small-time blogger will get the same attention as someone who writes for The New York Times.

We are currently tracking the news regarding the possibility that Protor & Gamble will sell its newly acquired Duracell division. What happens here will have a big impact on our battery sales.

The speculation that P&G will spin off this brand is getting lots of notice in the news and the blogosphere has much speculation about what might happen. Its time consuming to subscibe to blogs and newsfeeds, but Technorati lets you use simple search technology to find what you need when you have time to read.

If you want to know what customers or contacts might be saying about your company in their blogs you can quickly search your own name to see if you have gotten any mentions. There is probably no quicker way to preempt some bad information to to respond to a customer issue than to be able to quickly respond to a blog posting.

Another good source for blog searching is Googles Blog Search.   Just enter the same sort of search criteria you would place in a regular Google search field, but your seach will look at blog postings instead.  You’ll get different results than Technorati but both blog search engines return lots of interesting results.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Look to us first to meet your microphone accessory and battery needs.

If you carry a cell phone, you know how easy it is to receive calls, no matter where you are. Your phone number works all over the country. Folks who use VOIP phone services like Skype and Vonage can plug their internet phones in almost anywhere in the world and get calls on their local phone number.

Justin Timberlake’s Future Sex/Loveshow has taken the concept of staying connected to a new level. As reported in the July 2007 edition of PLSN magazine, the Timberlake summer tour is saving thousand of dollars on telco costs by carrying its own internet based phone system.

WANetics LLC is providing the hardware and technical expertise that lets the Future Sex/Loveshow skip the costs of having the venue provide expensive temporary phone service and hardware. Not only do they not incur local telecommunications expenses, but details like phone and fax number remain unchanged, regardless of where the tour is performing.

Each of the tours five departments (promoter, production, accounting, crew and tour management) has its own dedicated road case that accomodates phones, cables, a fax machine, batteries, wifi and an ethernet switch. All voice and data services are provided through a broadband internet connection and then distributed on a frequency that will travel well throughout the production area of the venue and will not interfere with WIFI frequencies.

According to the PLSN article, the tour reported that voice quality was excellent and that overall service was good even in venues where internet quality was less than perfect. Best of all, the whole system worked no matter what part of the world they were in. The system even provided special phone capabilities like voicemail and conferencing.

Personally, after having paid lots of these telco bills myself while working as a promoters rep, I’m not shedding any tears for the local phone companies that will lose this revenue stream. They consistently overcharged and underperformed.

Look for this service to become the standard for large touring organizations of all sorts in the near future.

Want to know more about WANetics tour support? Here’s the link!

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. All the supplies a major entertainment tour needs.

I’ve never been a big sports fan, but I began to follow some major sports when we had a chance to supply some very high profile events like the Super Bowl, NFL Playoffs, and The Kentucky Derby, etc. Knowing that we might have gaffers tape on the goal posts or batteries in the referee’s wireless mic has made me more interested.

Along with this interest comes an interest in reading the sports page. Some of the best writers for our local newspaper, The News and Oberver (Raleigh, NC) appear in the sports section and I have found myself drawn there every day. That may be about to change.

Yesterday’s front page of the sports section was really incredible. Out of six lead stories on the first page, only one was really about playing the game, whatever that game might be. Every other story was about some level of corruption in yet another major sport. The dog fighting scandal involving Michael Vick, Barry Bonds steriod use, doping allegations in the Tour de France, and gambling by an NBA referee all stole space from scores, trades and activity by local teams. It was more like reading a tabloid than a major newspaper sports page.

I grew up idolizing big league athletes, but my children have little interest in big time sports. This may or may not be related to the level of scandal, but, regardless, it means that they, and lots of their friends, won’t be buying tickets and purchasing merchandise.

We’ll continue to work with our customers who are involved in supporting major league sports, but if things don’t improve dramatically on the front page of the sports section, this is an industry heading for a major fall.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Look to us first to meet your microphone accessory and battery needs.

Because our web site, buybattery.com, scores so well in Google search, many consumers assume, incorrectly, that we are actually Duracell, and they contact us about customer service issues- even if they did not buy batteries from us. Mostly, they email to relate problems they have had with batteries, regardless of who the manufacturer or vendor is.

Unfortunately, I now have my own battery problem to relate. I periodically blog about wireless microphones, since we are the host of wirelessmic.net and because we were in the audio visual equipment rental business for many years. We still occasionally rent wireless mics.

I was preparing a rental package for a local sound company and discovered that two of our wireless transmitters contained corroded batteries. These were Everready Energizer Industrials, not the Procell batteries we sell. The offending batteries were well within their “use by” date code but they had leaked acid all over the battery contacts. Fortunately, the damage was limited to the battery contacts, but there was damage nonetheless.

If you are a regular user of wireless mics, the Energizer Industrials certainly don’t get the GoodBuyGuys.com seal of approval.

If you are interested in some more tips about batteries for wireless mics, click here.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Look to us first to meet your microphone accessory and battery needs.

After working on it for almost a year, last summer we were finally able to get a dealership for MagLites. I have enjoyed using these flashlights for years (every stagehand has one) and I was confident that the would be a big seller. I assumed (obviously incorrectly) that lots of our customers would be familiar with this line of flashlights and if our prices were competitive and our selection was good, they would sell.

We registered the web site, buymaglite.com, built a good e-commerce and information site, linked to goodbuyguys.com and waited for the orders to roll in.

Nothing!

We can’t give them away. Our offer on flashlights is always “batteries included“, we were never “out of stock” (I wish!), and the other sites affiliated with goodbuyguys.com were generating lots of traffic and lots of sales.

The quality of a Maglite has never been in dispute and the company does lots of national advertising to support the brand. These flashlights are durable, bright, and have a great warranty.

After several months of working on the web site, it scores well with major search engines, so it seems that buymaglite.com should be easy to find if someone actually wanted to “buy a Maglite”.

We’ll keep working on the site, but this problem is a real mystery to me.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Look to us first to meet your flashlight and battery needs.

I have periodically written in this space about the problems with using rechargeable batteries in wireless microphones. My primary concern regards being able to accurately predict the discharge rate for this type of battery and the problems they can cause in wireless mic use. These batteries use lithium technology, and it now turns out that there may be a much more significant problem when using rechargeable lithiums.

Information Week, a highly regarded technology publication, reports in the latest edition about exploding batteries in Chinese cell phones, including one that killed a Chinese welder. This was reported to be a Motorola phone, but Motorola’s response has been that the phone and/or the battery may have been counterfeit. If so, then Motorola might not have responsibility.

However, problems with counterfeit batteries or counterfeit Chinese products could easily invade the audio-visual market. There are many Chinese made wireless microphones on the market and lots of users think that they can save money buy buying offbrand lithium rechargeables for their mics.

Information Week is not the only source of info on exploding cell phone batteries. According to Engadget.com The Consumer Product Safety Commission reports 83 complaints on this matter in the last two years. They also point a finger towards suspect third party battery quality.

Furthermore, the problem seems to be made worse by overcharging the batteries, something that happens regularly with wireless mics, as they are often left in charge mode long after they are fully charged.

We don’t know of any reports of exploding AA, 9Volt or AAA lithium rechargeables, but the high number of reports about problems with all sorts of Chinese products gives me pause when thinking about any battery powered device that I might hold in my hand or close to my face.

For the time being, this would appear to be one more reason to wait for better future developments on rechargeable batteries for wireless mics and stick with alkalines.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and lots of other useful production supplies.

There is a new gas station down the road from us that has one of the cleverest pricing schemes I have ever seen. The highway this station is on has recently been widened and a median added so southbond traffic can’t turn into the station. The station is on the east side of the divided highway and most of the traffic on this road is north bound in the morning. Morning gas prices are typically 2 cents higher until noon. In the afternoon, they lower the pricing by a couple of cents to tempt south bound traffic to go to the next intersection and make a U turn. Next morning, the price is up again.

One of the advantages of online sales on the web is price flexibility. A web merchant can have instant sales, lower prices on overstocks, and pass along manufacturer discounts to prospective customers. You can test a pricing scheme without spending a lot of money on a catalog or a print ad. If you make a mistake, you can correct it in just a minute.

We experiment with pricing all the time but I don’t ever expect to come up with something as clever as the neighborhood gas station.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands.

We have quite a few touring acts as customers, but its rare when we get an order from one that everyone in our office gets excited about. A battery order that we got overnight has everybody humming “Heaven“. We love Los Lonely Boys and are glad to be involved with their summer tour. They ordered Duracell Procell batteries. They’re great for wireless mics and guitar effects. Lots of people have started using them for in ear monitors as well.

Being a supplier for touring acts is a real challenge. Its a lot like hitting a moving target. We try to make it easier by providing maps at our web sites showing a potential customer how long it will take to receive an order, based on their geographical location. We know if we can honor our commitment to ship all orders received by 2:00 pm the same day we get them, then our customers can accurately estimate delivery time.

When your order ships, we will email you a FedEx tracking number. All you need to do is click on that number and it will take you to information about your package.

We’re hoping to get to see Los Lonely Boys sometime this summer. You really ought to check them out!

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and many more tour support products.

Its been a while since I reviewed a cool new microphone. Calling the new FlashMic form HHB a microphone is like calling a computer a typewriter. Microphone just begins to describe this great new technology.

The FlashMic combines a handheld mic and an onboard digital recorder that has a full gigabyte of storage. The whole thing runs on AA batteries. No recorder, no cables, nothing but a handheld mic. It uses a quality Sennheiser mic capsule (cardiod or omni) and can record as much as 18 hours of broadcast quality audio.

This is a whole new take on the wireless mic concept. Rather than sending audio wirelessly to a receiver, it simply stores the audio for later downloading into a computer via an onboard USB port. Once you hook the FlashMic up to your computer, you can simply “drag and drop” audio files directly from the mic to your computer. It also has a standard headphone jack so you can listen to the audio directly from the mic or have an audio output that can feed conventional analog audio equipment.

What a great way to do a podcast!

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and  handy products for audio production.