I want to share what I think is a somewhat brilliant piece of merchandise: a condenser mic used for recording acoustic instruments that I found online. This guy builds them when you order them, it takes about 5 days to arrive. The cost: $32 (plus 5 to ship it cross country).

You read more about it at Naiant mic page.

There are a whole range of mic products for even less (!) for various applications including voice (see the application chart)

Now, I’m not a recording engineer and don’t have the kind of the ears or studio experience that can tell mics apart, leave alone the subtle differences between them, but if you’re on a budget I can’t imagine a better deal. You can hear my attempt at using it on an acoustic guitar track here. What do I know? I think it sounds great and I’m ordering 2 more so I can record in stereo and/or other musicians live.

The mic is smaller than my pinky and comes with absolutely NO accessories. For example I had to get a clamping mic clip to attach it to the stand.

Another thing you should consider is that it requires phantom power. I have the m-audio firewire 1814 interface which has a button on the front for this so I was ok. If you want to get serious you have to think about pre-amps.

Thanks for the tip; I can’t snatch that up right about now, but it’d certainly good to know about…
It’s tidbits like this that keep me loving things around here ;-)