[floydmoline]

close mic'ing more or less eliminates room dynamics, with a mic 2-3 inches from the speaker you could record in a garage or a cathedral, and it wouldn't make much differeance, only when doing things with ambient mics are you going to notice room acoustic effecting it much, i record almost on a daily basis, though i prefer sonar, and cakewalk suites, pro-tools i find you can only really take advantage of if you have a macintosh setup, my advise if you want to have a big sound and little investment to start up, your 2 most important items are a NICE dynamic mic, and a decent compressor / preamp, nice mic don't have to me expensive either, i have had seinheisers, nady, and shure mics, and they are all decent, but imo the nady starpower mics are just as good as the SM57s, and nady SP-1s are around 20 bucks while a SM57 is around 100, the seinheisers are a little better at recording guitar than others, but aren't real versitle, the SM57s are versitile, can record damn near anything with them, nady mics are cheap and sound good so you can kick them around and not feel bad about it, as far as compressors go, you are shooting for features here, since under 300 they are all basically created equal