In my small and limited crossovers with the entertainment industry/pro sound world I can verify that Shawn is correct: Duracell is the brand you'll see everywhere. Not somewhere - everywhere. I would also tend to trust the suggestion of someone in his position with that kind of real world experience. Words from the horse's mouth have always been the most reliable in my experience, especially when it comes to papers written on technical performance which are almost invariably skewed or flawed in some way. Just go with what everyone knows actually works and stop wasting your time, is my perspective. But hey, do whatcha want.
That said, I just use whatever batteries I can grab from work. LOL. There's a big bin of them which the company keeps stocked up for us. Pretty sure they're a Duracell lithium battery of some kind. I keep AAAs for my QC15/uflymike and AAs for my A20s.
That’s all that entire industry is doing, is “grabbing whatever batteries they can from work”. LOL. It’s a habit. And not a bad one, but not based in recent science or studies. Just a minor balance sheet item that nobody bothers with anymore out of simplicity.
Chemistry is chemistry. If the battery is made to a specific spec, it’ll perform the same as one with another label on it. What that business does is avoid any inconsistency by sticking to a brand.
If Duracell quadrupled the price of their batteries overnight in an effort to capitalize on the AV industry habit, the industry would switch. Plenty of batteries out there the perform as well as those do.
Tons and tons of electronics use Panasonic stuff, from alarm systems in critical places, to what’s provided in the box with a product. And proximity of the manufacturing plants to one another. Another industry sector’s habit.
Every sector has their battery habits. If you move out of alkaline, huge numbers of data centers use C&D or brands made by Johnson Controls and the many brand names they’ve acquired over the years.
You can’t budge them off of their habitual brand name due to validation bias, if you offered an identical product at half price. The only time they move off of a brand is in the price gouging scenario, and then they move almost overnight.
It’d be super easy for the AV world to demand electronics that were well-behaved to the discharge curves of rechargeable cells. They’d have the clout to get it. Nope, toss out hundreds of thousands of Duracells a year for powering microphones.
We have had the tech down for a long time to properly handle rechargeable, and not the way consumer gadgets fry rechargeable cells at a known slow death rate.
There’s satellites on orbit that have NiCD chemistry on board and have had almost no degradation of their cells in over a decade, often two, with irregular solar panel based charging. It’s about nailing the exact charge and discharge numbers down and designing to them.
Not that hard to figure out, but habits die hard.
AV sector would complain that it would be impossible to do the long recharge times needed between shows while traveling, but considering the amount of logistics that goes into any show setup and tear down, making sure batteries were on a rotational charge cycle and a customized battery recharge box, wouldn’t be difficult at all, compared to the amount of effort already put in.
Lots of “DieHards” in battery use by industry and sector.
It’s driven by the same brain short circuit that drives: “Choosy mothers, choose Jif!”
