For you tapers that have run these... Could a set of AT853s w/ phantom power and all the caps be good enough to be your only set of mics?
I'm using my AT853's a lot, and my answer is yes. You can either use phantom power, or "three wire" battery power. (I use a home-made battery box for this.) Standard two wire power (eg., Soundprofessionals) will distort.
how would such three wire battery power be done? Is there a diagram around for this?
There is a thread about this:
http://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=18846.0;allbut this is for connecting the Samson adapters. But I don't really trust the Samson quality. I would try to use AT adapters only.
My homemade box is as follows:
There are three wires on each mic: Red, Yellow and Shield. (Well, red and yellow are really a twisted pair, both containing the
same signal.)
Connect Red on each mic to + on a 9V battery. Shields to battery negative terminal.
Put a load resistor (say 22K or 27K) between yellow and shield for each mic (two resistors).
Put a capacitor (say 2.2uF metal film) from the yellow wire to audio output (two capacitors).
Take audio outputs from the film capacitor (side opposite yellow wire) and from ground.
That's it!
Note: I soldered everything to avoid connectors between the batt. box and the mics. I glued all the parts on top of a battery holder. I run a single 3.5mm stereo plug out to minidisc/dat/etc.
The battery holder is about $5 at Newark.com (P/N 92C3807).
To start the power, just insert 9V battery on sliding tray. Remove after show.
I'll post pictures of this if I can. Well, the problem is after glueing I wrapped everything in shrinkwrap so you can't see the wiring.
Richard