Microphone Has Poor Pick-Up

[GGOODI716]

Using soundpro drivers. Just purchased a good mic. Cranked up the mic record slider full blast. Cant get any pickup. Must talk directly into mike. This causes distortion and is not comfortable. Tried two mics. same problem. Even replaced the drivers with c-media. No change. Everything else works well. Whats the problem?

Greg

[Chosen One]

Just for the hell of it, try a different sound card and see if you have the same results. Let me know.

[Platypus]

The microphone input on many sound cards is very poor, low gain and noisy. Also the output level on a high quality mic may be fairly low, do you know its impedance? 600 ohm is common, but good quality mics may be 150 or 200 ohm, and have even lower output.

You'll always get better sound using a pre-amp to get a line-level signal to feed to the card's line in.

Some soundcards have mic gain settings in the driver, x1, x2, x4 to allow for different mic sensitivities.

Another possibility, some cards have a jumper setting for condenser mics, which feeds a supply voltage to the mic socket. This would upset a dynamic (coil type) mic, which I guess yours is. A condenser (sometimes called phantom power) option should be set to off.

[GGOODI716]

Thanks for the response. I may go the preamp route as this is logical. I assume software is available on the net for this? If not will look at a better sound card.


Thanks again.

[Jeff the Brit]

The mixer may have an option under Options on the menu for Advanced Settings. Tick that, and see if an Advanced button appears under the mike slider. Click that and see if there is a boost button there... might say 20dB or similar.