GoKawiilOne of the annoying things about electronics is that so many companies must make their own incompatible battery packs. For many products these are expensive but at some level still reasonable, the battery pack contains the protection circuitry and some guaranteed high quality Li-ion cells.
This is not one of those devices. A significant portions of all wireless microphones by Sennheiser use the same BA2015 battery pack. These devices can also take two regular AA batteries but when using those it won't charge them in the dock. So how much would you pay for a bit of plastic around two standard Ni-mh AA batteries?
This is one of the cheaper legit ones. The smaller changes ask $80-$100 for them
I think this is a top contender for most expensive package of AA batteries you can get, and I have several microphones that need to have these replaced.
From the official Sennheiser page for these batteries:
It contains two rechargeable NiMH cells and is inserted into the battery compartment instead of two standard AA cells. The battery pack features an integrated sensor which indicates the battery status, monitors temperature during recharging and avoids the charging of non-rechargeable batteries.
The integrated sensor that gives this battery pack all these features is in fact a $0.02 NTC temperature sensor, most of the functionality they list here is actually the battery management chip that's in the microphone, not in the battery pack.
The only real reason for these things to exist is to avoid the charging of non-rechargeable batteries since you can put Alkaline AA batteries in this microphone and run it for a few hours, so this avoids that edge case of someone both owning the super expensive charging docks but removing the original battery and putting cheap non-rechargable batteries in there.
I get that might be a problem and I can't think of a better solution either, but that doesn't mean you have to ask this much money for this. It seems like third party battery manufacturers agree. This is why it's possible to get way cheaper replacement parts for it.
Third party replacement battery pack from the home brand of a dutch webshop
... continue reading