I recreated Den's microphone amplifier circuit on a solderless breadboard to test it and make sure it does what it's supposed to. So far it seems like everything is working- I'll do some testing tomorrow to see what the amplified output is like for some test noises. Here's the circuit diagram that Den made (his elog as well https://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:8081/40m/6651):

I'm not sure why he set up the circuit the way he did- he has pin 7 grounded and pin 4 going to +12V while in the datasheet for the opamp (http://cds.linear.com/docs/en/datasheet/1677fa.pdf), pin 7 goes to positive voltage and pin 4 goes to negative voltage. There's some other strange things about the circuit that I don't really understand, such as the motivation for using no negative voltage source, but for now I'm going to stick with Den's design and then make some modifications after I have things working and a better understanding of the problem.

Here's my current plan:

-Make sure Den's amplifier works, test it out and make changes if necessary

-Make multiple amplifier circuits on soldering breadboard

-Either make a new amplifier box or reuse Den's old box depending on how many changes I make to the original circuit

-Solder EM172s to BNC connectors, set them up around the floor suspended

-Get the amplifier box hooked up, set up some data channels for the acoustic noise

-Add new acoustic noise tab to the summary pages

Den also mentioned that he wanted me to measure the coupling of acoustic noise to DARM.