I hate my mic

[SirWilliam007]

My mic was going good after the last problem i had , then i started not being able to hear my friends talk , then after a few days now he cant hear me talk i dont know whats wrong this time my mic is a Labtec and its almost brand new ...plz respond.

[Brain]

I hate your mic too.


Seriously, I don't think it's the microphone, but rather sound card settings.

[Sehnsucht]

I have a Labtec mic also (actually, two of them), and the same problem. Now I'm stuck with two piece of crap mics and I'm 40$ poorer because I can't return them. I run my sound through my speakers, so I've never tested their headphones, but the sound quality on the mic is TERRIBLE. It does not pick up the letters "T", "X", "S", or anything with a slight lisp at all. You also have to put the incredibly short cord tight to your face and touching your mouth to pick up any noise at all. To get it somewhat hearable, I have to turn my TS volume all of the way up. To top it off, the sound quality is terrible. So, I'm in the same boat after I got tricked into buying from this shitty brand. Your problem is the "Made in China" label on the box, since every mic I've gotten from China sucked.

Does anyone have any suggestions for good moderately priced mics? I'm in the $20-30 range right now. I'm considering Logitech since I know they made products that actually work as advertised, but they're a bit pricy.

[Brain]

It doesn't necessarily need to be the microphone's fault. You didn't mention that you have fiddled around with the mixer recording controls. Maybe you should do that before buying a new mic. Turn up the amplification, enable mic boost, that sort of thing.
If that doesn't work you might just have a sound card with a crappy microphone input. That's what happened to me after I bought a new mainboard. Old mainboard on-board mic input was fine, the new one was "teh suck".
Something else you might try is visit a friend with a PC and test your microphone on his computer. If it works well there but not very well on your system it's probably the sound card's physical construction that is bad.


Good luck!