You Raise Me Up

Butchering through this relatively long piece by Kyle Landry.

External Microphone Problem with Realtek HD Audio

One day, my 12-year-old son’s MSI GT70 laptop simply would not detect external microphone (on the headset) any more. I tried to update Realtek audio drivers, looked up any online forums but nothing worked.

I noticed that if I hover my mouse over the microphone jack (the pink one in below diagram (although on mine it shows black)) the text says ‘Center & Subwoofer’ instead of microphone. I thought it might be driver or hardware problem.

But my son thought differently. He reckoned that there must be something wrong at the configuration, and it turned out that it is simply the Speaker Configuration (combo box / drop down list) in the below diagram.

If you choose more than 4 speakers, the microphone jack will be used for audio output for the center speaker instead of for microphone input. So the solution is as simple as changing the Speaker Configuration to quad… or less and that will free up the pink jack for microphone.

After fixing that problem, the mic worked fine on Windows 10’s Voice Recorder, but the volume was too faint on Skype. To fix that, my son unchecked the ‘let application have exclusive control’ option of the sound device from Windows Control Panel.

So now the headset is fully functional. Next time anyone ask me to fix their computer or phone, I will outsource them to my son!