  We compare two area spectra proposed in loop quantum gravity in different
approaches to compute the entropy of the Schwarzschild black hole. We describe
the black hole in general microcanonical and canonical area ensembles for these
spectra. We show that in the canonical ensemble, the results for all
statistical quantities for any spectrum can be reproduced by a heuristic
picture of Bekenstein up to second order. For one of these spectra - the
equally-spaced spectrum - in light of a proposed connection of the black hole
area spectrum to the quasinormal mode spectrum and following hep-th/0304135, we
present explicit calculations to argue that this spectrum is completely
consistent with this connection. This follows without requiring a change in the
gauge group of the spin degrees of freedom in this formalism from SU(2) to
SO(3). We also show that independent of the area spectrum, the degeneracy of
the area observable is bounded by $C A\exp(A/4)$, where $A$ is measured in
Planck units and $C$ is a constant of order unity.
