if you are on a budget there is an amazing microphone that is made
that is almost perfectly flat in specs, from 20hz to 20,000hz.

It is also a stereo condesder microphone called the Sony ECM DS70p
and is very small.

Nowadays, you can get digial modellings of the world's most expensive microphones so if you use
a microphone like this, you can just put it through and algorithm inside of a digital sound editor (like Sound Forge
or Peak) and, voila................you just saved yourself thousands of dollars in pricey botique microphone purchases
with the same audio quality.

And the damn thing is only $79!


www.musiciansfriend.com/produc...rophone

As for recording..............DO NOT BUY a minidisc recorder................for years they have been one of the coolest inexpensive ways to record audio but there is suddenly a proliferation of recorders out that have far, far better quality

Check out the M-Audio 24/96 MICRO recorder
www.zzounds.com/item--MDOMICRO

or the one by Edirol
namm.harmony-central.com/WNAMM...9.html

They are amazing, compact and have far better quality of recording.
The mini discs as muich as I love them (hell my second CD was entirely made up of minidisc board recordings of 50 of
my found sound/live looping concerts), the recording quality is pretty limited by contrast.

Also, there have been so many of them hitting the market this year that I'm sure the prices will fall considerably within the next 12 months. Right now they are all around the $4-500 range but that won't last long, I predict. It's just too cheap to make them these days.

And Sony has upped the price of their recording minidisc to around $250 so I truly would wait a bit and buy the much better
'flash recording devices listed above

just put portable stereo digital recorders into Google and a bunch of things will come up. that's what I just did

good luck, Sean

I have to disagree alittle with the last post.. Just alittle bit tho. I do agree that you dont need to spend allot of money and there are many new great cheap Chinese condensers. But you cant just go by frequency specs alone. There are many other factors. If you have a chance to A/B a $100 Chinese with an $4000 geffel or even an $400 akg 414 you would be surprised... Modeling gear is great but it cant create something that wasn't there in the 1st place. The sensitivity, definition, clarity, QC , and color is what you pay for with high end mics. Now using a standard quality mic like a 414 with modeling you can get some fun results. I'm not a fan of modeling myself i'd rather have the full unaltered clean signal from a mic to work with. If i want it to be altered i like to be the one changing the color for my needs, not some premade impulse. I like said there are some great cheep mics but if you want to buy more then one for stereo recording make sure you test both at the store. You will go threw a handfull till you get 2 that are close in sound.. I've done this a few times..

check out the Audio-Technica AT822 stereo condensor. i took it all over Asia with me, and got mad samples into my portable DAT. iit's not a compact mic, but it sounds amazing. it's also battery powered which is a nice convenience. make sure whatever mic you get, that ist is a stereo mic of course. the AT822 costs about $240