which battery and mic to buy?

[soul&folk]

I bought a mz-n707 off ebay and it just arrived

the battery it came with (nc-wmaa 1.2v 700 mAh) has clearly been sitting around too long and is corroded.

What is the smartest replacement for this - does it have to be an exact match?

what does mAh stand for and must that be 700?

must I replace it with nickel cadmium only?

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what's the right mic to buy if I want to just record on the run - ie. keep it in my car and quickly record something off the radio - or have in my pocket and quickly pop it out to record a musical thought?

Edited February 27, 2007 by soul&folk

[raintheory]

You can use a standard AA battery for the N707.

[A440]

You can also use a rechargeable AA if you want. Anything AA will work correctly.

mAh--milliamp hours--is how much charge the battery holds. Even back when the MZ-N707 came out, 700 was pretty feeble. Now you can find rechargeable AA's at 2500 or even 2700 mAh, comparable to a Duracell or Energizer alkaline. Even cheap disposable batteries will also last a very long time, as you'll see.

As for a mic, what are you recording?

[soul&folk]

You can also use a rechargeable AA if you want. Anything AA will work correctly.

mAh--milliamp hours--is how much charge the battery holds. Even back when the MZ-N707 came out, 700 was pretty feeble. Now you can find rechargeable AA's at 2500 or even 2700 mAh, comparable to a Duracell or Energizer alkaline. Even cheap disposable batteries will also last a very long time, as you'll see.

As for a mic, what are you recording?

thanks. thats just what I needed to know.

As for the mic, I'll be buying 2 mics. One of them I'm almost sure will be the Sony ECM-MS907. That's for when I'll be sitting on a couch and playing the guitar. I might just bring it to some gigs I do with a musical group I perform with. I've seen this done with this exact unit and mic successfully by someone else recording us. If you'd like to hear how the Sony ECM-MS907 did on a recent rehearsal I had with my group, go to my website and check out the song at the bottom of the page called Gotta Get to the Minyan on Time.

(as for all the other songs there, most were done as a way of learning songwriting and home recording. I know there's much room left for improvement on most of them. None of them are the final version. I'm waiting to hit 20 songs and then I plan on going back to the beginning. But feel free to download them if you like them. most are in hebrew though)

But I was asking about the other one. A mic for quick on the go recording - almost treating the unit like a voice recorder. I'm a songwriter and I often hear a part of a song or even background music to a radio ad and want to remember it for future reference. Sometimes I'll be at my desk and a musical thought comes to mind. I'd like to be able to just click and record. Of course I'd prefer decent quality sound especially if I'm trying to capture something from the radio as I'm driving - perhaps it was a bass line that I want to remember, or perhaps it was something about the overall feel of the song. Good quality recording would help me remember what grabbed me as I heard it the first time. So this mic doesn't have to be stereo but I suppose it would be nice if it is.

I've seen tiny mics that resemble pins such as this

then there's the stereo ones like this

I'd like it small for portability but also want it to have decent sound. Maybe a lavalier mic???

Another usage I might end up using this for is to record lectures.

Edited February 28, 2007 by soul&folk