I paid around US$700-800 for a nice Neumann mic that I’d researched pretty well, but like a dumbass didn’t realise that it required power, meaning I couldn’t just hook in to my amp like your basic Shure.
So later on as a solution, I got myself a Focusrite powered amp-interface that has a bonus of being able to route guitar and mic input in to USB. Spent hours trying to get everything working and kept running in to problems. IIRC the USB signal was barely received by my computer, and the only way the amp received a signal is if the computer was powering the thing, which shouldn’t have been a requirement as it already had power.
I just went back to my Shure while that fancy stuff gathers dust. Similar thing with my Ableton.
That made perfect sense to me for a moment because I’ve read several times now that NZ seems to be the preferred location for global billionaires to build their ultimate survival bunkers when collapse happens.
Plus, I imagine they’d want people topside to hang on there reasonably well for several reasons, such as a labor pool, genetics pool, testing pool, and possibly to grow some food on the surface.