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.

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.

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.

We’ve been trying, with some success, to establish an Ebay presence for some time. Our Ebay store, BuyMicStand, has had some limited sales success and I guess we will stick with it for awhile longer. The difficulty of posting. selling, communicating with customers, etc. is so harder on Ebay than running your own ecommerce site with a shopping cart that is difficult to understand Ebay’s success. We’ll probably eventually add items like mic stands and extension cords, but it is so difficult to do that I keep putting it off.

I guess that if you have only a single item to sell or you only sell occasionally, then an auction site makes some sense. But Ebay stores are entirely different. They almost always use the “Buy It Now” concept, so there is no real auction going on, and the fees that Ebay forces you to add in order to list your product are far beyond those that are necessary if you run your own shopping cart.

There is so much information pushed at a merchant who is trying to manage his online store, that you sometimes feel like you are going to go blind trying to find the link you need to manage one aspect of the store. The user interface is rarely updated and the result is that Ebay pages are so stuffed with images and text that it is impossible to focus on any one thing. This may be okay if you are shopping, but if you are a merchant, its different. You should be able to link to a page where primary merchant functions like adding an item or adjusting a price can be done without having to seek these functions out among others like “Eligible for Relist Fee Credit” and “Change my cross-promotion preferences“. These may be useful tools for power sellers but they shouldn’t be given equal status with user functions like “Sell My Item“.

Ebay has continued to maintain its dominance for online sales but they are ripe to be challenged by someone who does it better.

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.

My son and one of his friends have started podcasting. They record audio only to a digital camcorder and then transfer it to his computer for uploading. This works pretty well and I applaud him for coming up with a creative recording solution. Unfortunately, this creates huge file sizes which complicate editing and uploading.Most of what they do is in an interview or discussion format and this can make it pretty tough to get good audio quality just using the microhone from the camcorder.

I recently came across a solution that would allow him to record directly to his computer using a handheld mic and its a pretty neat device. The LightSnake USB intelligent microphone cable will allow you to plug a regular microphone (the kind that use standard XLR connectors) directly into a USB port. This means that you can use any type of microphone connected to the LightSnakes 10′ microphone cable without a mixer or any other sort of audio preamp. The circuitry for converting audio signals into USB is built right into the cable. It even has led’s in the cable that glow when the LightSnake is installed properly.

The Lightsnake is not cheap, at $70.00, but when you consider the price of a good mic preamp, a USB interface, and the hassles of cabling the packge,  the price seems reasonable. The “plug and play” simplicity is what really makes this a device worth considering, as converting audio to USB can get pretty complicated.

Need just a regular mic cable? Click here.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, MagLite flashlights, Procell Batteries, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Entertainment 1 extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands , and, now, Hosatech microphone cables.

We’re ready to roll out a new domain, and my task is to create new content to support this domain. We want to both make it more useful to our customers and appealing to search engines. While I enjoy the task and like the challenge, I am constantly wondering why I need to redo a job that someone else has already done, and probably done better.

Buymiccable.com is our latest edition of web sites at goodbuyguys.com. We know from lots of experience that there are few tools more powerful for building web site traffic than good, keyword enriched content. There’s not that much content online about mic cables, but what is out there is pretty good. When someone like Proco creates a really useful guide like “How To Choose The Right Cable“, then we are happy to link to it, even though we sell a competing brand of mic cables.

Rather than try to keep our potential customers away from competitors content, we’ll jump at the chance to provide our customers with good information, regardless of the source.

The challenge is, of course, to create new and useful content of our own that doesn’t simply restate the information that another web site has already provided.

I’ve got a lot of work to do!

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, MagLite flashlights, Procell Batteries, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Entertainment 1 extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands , and, now, Hosatech microphone cables.

The online newsletter from Pro Sound News is a great source of news for the pro audio industry. It is avialble through a an online subscripton and there is always an item I find interesting.

Heil Sound, a company that made a name for itself in the 1970’s (they came up with the voice box sound heard on “Frampton Comes Alive“) is now a high end microphone manufacturer. Their special Pink Pearl Mirophone , a large diaphragm vocal mic, is being offered in a pearl pink finish in a fund raising effort for breast cancer awareness. This mic has a really flat response cure and an extremely linear cardiod pattern.

Working with the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, Heil will donate a portion of every sale of this mic to the Komen Foundation. They’ve pledged a least $6800.00 to the cause.

The Heil PR20 (pink and other colors available) has a special linux structure that handles very high sound pressure levels and is claimed to be immune from overload.

Here’s a link to the PSN story, and another link to the Heil announcement.

If you want to know more about the Heil Mic, click here.

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 many other products sound pros need.

There’s an interesting feature on NPR these days, about once a week, called “This I Believe”. It’s a modern take on a broadcast feature from the 1950’s started by Edward R. Murrow. This weeks essay features Craig Newmark, the founder of Craig’s List. A couple of things really resonated with me regarding Mr. Newmark’s essay.

Craig Newmark has consistently refused to sell his website, even though it is estimated that it would fetch tens of millions of dollars. He enjoys the community he has built and he doesnt’ want to turn it over to someone else whose motives might be very different from his own. Instead of being the CEO directing a staff who manages a huge domain in cyberspace, he spends his days in customer service. It’s what he really enjoys.

As our business grows, I find that I am constantly being drawn away from what I enjoy most-talking to customers about solving their problems. I like to think that thirty-some years in the special events business has given me some unique insights into subjects like taping down cables and choosing the correct microphone stand. Answering the phone and responding to customers’ email inquiries is the only way to know if the knowledge that I have accumulated over the years is of any real value to anyone else. Using what we learn from our customers can then be incorporated into our websites and the information is available whenever anyone needs it.

The other observation in Craig Newmark’s “This I Believe” is his continuing affirmation that most people are honest and have good intentions. I have to make decisions every day regarding whether or not it is a good idea to extend credit to a new customer. Our experience with customers defaulting on their obligations is amazing. Everyone pays their bills. The default rate is less the 1/10 of 1% and this number has been consistent for years. Having our decisions about credit constantly reaffirmed makes us feel really good about the customers who want to work with us.

I doubt if I’ll ever get around to recording a “This I Believe” essay of my own, but it is good to know I share some beliefs with a cyberhero like Craig Newmark.

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 supplies for entertainment production.