you can tell the difference, but you would have already have had to spend a bunch of dough on tuning the room and putting in very good speakers, and tuning them to the room... and of course for the very fine detail, you would have had to spend most of your life wearing earplugs. But there is a difference. also not all microphones need power. most use an induction based transducer to create a very small ac voltage (-60ish dB), which is then bumped up by the mic preamp, depending on the device to -10 or +4 dB. Condenser mics need power to charge the plates, tube mics also need power... and there is at least one mic that I know of which has a dynamic element but has active electronics in it to tweak the frequency response and requires phantom power.

try zzounds.com or guitar center for usb or firewire connected audio i/o devices... look in the category "computer recording"

At some point, the length of cable will reach a point where the capacitance will start to kill the low end of your frequency spectrum... Crosstalk on balanced, twisted pair lines is typically very low. It is the whole point of twisted pair... The transceivers at each end use some form of common mode rejection to kill most of whatever the lines pick up in interference. the higher the number of twists per unit of length, the better it will be at rejecting noise and crosstalk.

Someone will put a dish on his roof, hack in and use it to spam...

The CO2 released from brewing or baking, not counting the fossil fuels used to fertilize, harvest and process the grain, have a net zero effect because the grain harvested the Carbon from the atmosphere. Think of it as a biofuel, Ethanol to be precise.

OMG SKYNET!!!

Might these be some of the same forerunners of life on earth? They have found several bacteria that can survive the vacuum of space, it seems to me that the upper atmosphere is a great deal more hospitable.

buy them, take them home, and a few minutes later you have plugged them into your Ipod and all is for naught...

No, In the US they surround the perimeter of important bases with military housing, so if anyone lobs anything over the wall, it just takes out the families of servicemen who can't afford to live off base because of the paltry salary they are paid.

The UK is complaining about being in the panopticon??? I want to warn you all!!! Just in case you didn't notice... every person around you has a camera, there is a camera in every shop, many street corners, pretty much every public space... I realize most people know this, but I geuss we have to warn the governments... they invented the thing and they themselves have now come under its inspection. I think it is a good move towards a more open government, and, one would hope, a decline in "security theatre" and an increase in actual security where it is warranted.

Multidimensional compression due to intense and increasing effects of gravitation. ...So, if we were being sucked into a black hole, would every object in the universe appear to be moving away from us. If the source of the gravity was sufficiently large would it appear that the effect locally would be minuscule, while causing us to believe in a non steady state every expanding universe because all distant observable phenomena appear to be moving away from us? Is it possible that the redshifts in the spectra are caused by us speeding away from the light as the space we are occupying gets stretched and twisted by gravity due to the effects of a spinning black hole? Just a thought.