Of course -- the local mic data for the user (if they are listening to their own mic) doesn't have to do the entire network round trip.

I'll add in the check if the user is the same as the mic once the user model has the "currentUser" function back in. Then it's a simple check to see if we are listening to ourselves, and we don't have to subscribe to the pubsub mechanism in that case, we just NSNotify immediately.