[Tobiah]

It's easy with a condenser mic because the first stage of the preamp
is built into the mic, so the loading is always going to be right.

This leads me to wonder why it's not more popular to put the
whole preamp in the microphone. At one time the answer was
that the preamp was expensive and many mics could use the same
preamp. Now I wonder (and am asking) whether it would be more
advantageous to engineer the mics to output line level signals
all by themselves. I'm aware of the advent of USB mics and that
they, in a vague sense, address this.


Tobiah