Would this mic work?

Every so often, a buddy of mine that I met at work and I get together at his place for a jam session. Sometimes there's other people over playing different instruments (keyboards, bass). He was looking into buying a mic so that we could record some of these jams. He needs one mic for the whole room, then we'll hook it up to his soundcard and record straight in.

He found this one at musiciansfriend (someone told me that was an oxymoron). Would that be sufficient for our needs and budget?

Is there anything else we'd need to get this operation off the ground? What about the actual placement of the mic? There could be as many as 4 amps playing at once.

This has been suggested to me many times for recording a whole band with one mic. I don't have experience with it, but I have heard some recordings that used it, and they sounded pretty darn good.

that stereo mic has some small print

"NOTE: will only work with Sony MZ-NH1, MZ-NH900, and MZ-NHF800 MiniDisc recorders"

The first one will be fine if you can supply it with phantom power and have an XLR connection. Sound cards cant usually do either.

If you want to use a condenser mic (like the first one) the cheapest option is to get a Behringer channel strip like the ultra-gain pro that will supply a mic preamp (much better than the one in your sound card), some EQ, some compression, some de-essing and phantom power. You plug this into the "line in" of your sound card (not the "mic in" as you will overload it) or the newer ones have an S/PDIF out which you can also hook up to the digital S/P DIF in if your sound card has one.

Mic placement will be critical to getting the best sound possible however Id not worry too much about that until you have a mic that works.

I think Radio Shack also makes a similar mic to that sony stereo mic. (I didn't notice the fine print :rolleyes: )

Believe it or not, I actually got some pretty good recordings of my old band by using an SM57 that was placed about 7 feet in the air facing the center of the room. It was plugged into some cheap tape recorder, but once we got in on the computer and added a little eq, the recording's really didn't turn out all that bad concidering things. It was a great tool for helping us structure our songs.