Electronics is hard. When I think I figured stuff out, there comes another layer of consideration I'd never heard of.
In this case, however, I'm not very nervous about distortion. Speakers I only want to drive to verify that my crt works.
Ultimately, I only want a blink an LED for bass of music that is picked up by an electret mic. Figured, let's amp the mic a little bit, give it some juice too ( mic -> op-amp -> class-a -> band pass filter ) and we done!
Haha! My nativity was tremendous...