[PLUG] Microphones

[John Jason Jordan]

I need a microphone to record speech clips in Phonetics class. The
usual telephone quality microphones are not high enough quality, but I
don't need the kind of microphone they'd use to record a symphony.
Should be unidirectional and noise-cancelling. 

I bought one today at Radio Shack, but will have to take it back
because it doesn't put out enough juice to make a loud enough recording
on my Compaq R3240 notebook with Ubuntu amd-64 Dapper. I cranked all
the sliders to the max, but it was just not loud enough. For the
record, the specs on the Radio Shack microphone are:

	60-16KHz frequency response (a sheet inside 
		had a graph which was fairly flat) 
	Impedance 500 ohms + or - 30%
	Sensitivity -75 dB + or - 3 dB

Of course, I have no idea what the sound card in the computer is
expecting. I looked in Device Manager, but other than "NVidia nforce 3"
there is no mention of a manufacturer in any of the sound device
listings. Is there a command line I can use to figure out at least what
the device is? If I knew that maybe I could google and find out what
kind of microphone it is expecting.