Topic: external mic camcorder?

[mnm6677]

Hello
       A few questions that I hope someone can answer. I am going to buy a camcorder soon to record shows, both stealth and non. From what I have researched most camcorder audio sucks. With this in mind I want to use an external mic. I am looking at sonys pc9,105 and 109 camcorders all have mic inputs. My budget is tight which of these mics would be best in small venues and large ones, core sounds sp-sb-2, sp-bmc-9 or sp-bmc-3? Now should I use a battery box with bass roll off to run the mics thru? The cs mini batt module would be easy to use with with any of these cams. I also have a pcm-1dat  that I could record on, but would think it would be to tough to record both audio and video at the same time. I was thinking I could tape the mics to the front of the cam and go from there. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[dklein]

The enemy is the Automatic Gain Control built into all consumer cameras.  If you can't find a camera that allows you to disable it, there's almost no point in putting better mics into the camera when you're trying to shoot a live show.  Record audio on the M-1 and feed its headphone out into your camera to make post-synching easier.

The other issue that seems to come up is low light performance.  In the past, Sony has done better than most but like everyone else, they're all trending toward smaller CCDs (cheaper, allow for a smaller camera) and this is hurting the low light performance.  My recent trip to a specialty video store has enlightened me - I need to spend almost $3k to get something better than what I bought for $1k a coupla years ago.  And todays models apparently won't even do as well because of the shrinking CCD pehenomenon (apparently 1/4" is where you want to be).