No, you had several posts that would be considered trolling *if we were being generous*. I have nothing to prove - I've established myself as someone who knows what he's talking about and who is both willing and able to help, and even then I wasn't out to build a reputation. If we're going to talk about having something to prove, we should start a teensy bit earlier in the thread where people who knew what they were talking about *far better than you seemed to acknowledge* were berated for some reason. If that's too early, we could start at the part where you thought that you could read my mind, pulling forth such details as what I thought of you and how passive-aggressive I was willing to be to give the appearance of looking cool.
A hint... I know that if it weren't for already knowing that other posters - for example, the ones who recommended attention to playing style instead of giving EQ or compression tips - knew what they were talking about, it might seem that they were trying to insult your abilities or unable to understand what you were asking... but that's not the case. (The other Jeff, for example, has known what he is talking about for quite some time. Chryst Krispies, for another example, has toured long enough with a large enough metal band that he, too, knows how not to be an ass, and when someone as laid-back as he is thinks that you're acting up, it's time for a perspective check. These are just the first two that come to mind from that early in the thread - there are other posters who have tried to help, knowing very well how to make guitars sound good, and gotten dismissed because you knew so damned well that boosting or cutting frequencies was what you're missing. When you got responses relating to playing style it's not because nobody understood your question but because *they knew what went into sounds like that*.) I know that it might seem reasonable to pretend that everything I do is a passive-aggressive slight against you, but it's not. (In order to insult you as I said I would do earlier, I'd probably first have to believe that... and I don't - I think that you're a bit impatient and that you haven't quite caught on to how things work here, but that's about the end of it.) A better way to handle things like that would have been to make sure that you were reading people properly and that they understood your questions *before* posts like those, and it is clear that you haven't learned from that mistake. If you want to sound like you're beyond the trolling nonsense and stupid attacks, *be* beyond them, instead of baiting for off-topic responses as you have while saying that you want to move on - it doesn't sound like you really want to leave the mudslinging behind, it sounds like you want to have had the last jab and then pretend to be able to take the high road when people who know more about how the forum works try to set things straight and keep things like the first page of the thread from happening again. If you've actually learned your lesson about how not to treat experienced, knowledgeable people who try to help you, *show it* and keep in mind that you've earned quite a bit more flak than you'll ever face in this thread because the big posters around here act in the way that you've said things should be - it's far safer to ask for clarification and probe around a bit than it is to make assumptions about who has something to prove and who has stupid facial hair.
As far as recording equipment... if you had mentioned that constraint earlier (a constraint that many, myself included, are familiar with and understand completely) you would have gotten *far* more patience and fewer people would have suspected that you were a troll just looking to pick stupid fights. As soon as you can give clips, you'll get more useful responses - even recording straight into whatever you have available and plugging into an amp sim would be a good start. I hope that you can at least see how you haven't given anyone here a whole lot to work with and that you'll be fixing these things soon.
Jeff