Laptop Microphone Input

Hi everyone,

I've been recording my rehearsals with a stereo microphone (Sony ECM-939LT electret condenser) plugged into a minidisk recorder (Sony MZ-R70). I then take the minidisk home and plug it into my desktop computer with a Steinberg ST 24/96 sound card running Cubase. The sound card has an optical input but unfortunately my minidisk does not have a optical output, only an optical input. So I use an analog cable with a 1/8inch mini stereo plug on one side for the minidisk and a 1/4inch stereo plug on the other side to the sound card. I hit record on the computer and play on the minidisk and then walk away for how ever long my rehearsal was. Come back, normalize the audio, chop up the tracks and then burn a CD.

Well it occurred to me that (while I am saving up for a Presonus Firebox) what if I plugged the Sony stereo microphone into my laptops internal sound card?

Has anyone ever done this? Is that microphone input stereo? I wonder how the quality would be compared to the input on the minidisk?

I guess I should go home and try this out but I thought I'd pick the collective brain to see what I was missing.

Thanks,

Benner

 

I'm lucky because my Sony stereo mic has a battery in it. I plug that into the Line Input on my Laptop and it seems to work great. With my loud rock band using Cubase, the loudest parts in the recording measure -4 to -5 on the Cubase levels. It's a little quieter with my 3 peice jazz combo, -10 to -12 so I might look into a simple stereo preamp to raise the mic input gain.