Can't record with mic.

[henthorn]

I have an Hp Pavilion 6330 that was changed over to a Gigabyte GA7ZX motherboard with an 800mhz AMD Duron processor, 256 megs of sdram. The Aureal vortexs ound card went bad and I tried replacing the sound card and things went ok until I found by accident that I was using the onboard sound not the new sound card. I disabled the on board sound and the new card didn't work. I replaced it with a Sound Blaster 16 PCI which turned out to be incompatible with WinXP when I chenged over. I next tried a Diamond DT 688 which was su;pposed to be supported by XP but couldn't get the thing to record with the mic. I now have a Phillips Sonic Edge card which was designed to work with XP but I still have the same problem. I have the mic plugged into the red outlet. The mic was checked with Radio Shack and I also tried another mic and it didn't work either. System sounds and the CD play ok. I have gone to the volume controls by different means and the mic is unmuted and the volume is high. If I go to the main volume control/options the advanced tab is grayed out so I can't incease the mic gain. In my ignorance it seems to me that the card and mic are probably ok and that the problem is either in the motherboard or with XP. I've been fighting this problem fo several months. Can someone help with this?

[dave-harper]

hold on a minute and i'll expand this post - refresh the page
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explore control panel - sounds - devices - audio ( recording ) and voice ( recording )

see if everything seems right

it may be leftover stuff from the onboard

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you could wipe all the sound hardware and try the motherboard one with the latest drivers

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it is the mic connect and settings
not the line in

[henthorn]

I have gone to the Controlpanel/sound and audio devices and checked the playback and recording settings which are OK. I have gone to add/remove programs and removed the other cards. I have also gone into Windows Explorer and removed the things I could find. Is there anywhere else I might find residual files?

I have downloaded the latest files from the Gigabyte site. I guess my next attempt will be to remove the Philips card and the drivers and try tp reactivate the on board sound. I haven't been able to bring up the manual on the Gigabyte site so I don't know if there is a bar or something that needs to be moved to reactivate the OB sound. Does anyone have any experence with that?

[dave-harper]

i see the phillips software - Sound Agent 2 - ( little blue head down by the clock )

even using it's default button does NOT unmute the mic if it has been muted

the mic settings for this phillips software are in the "Mixer" page - # 4

[dave-harper]

check the phillips software to be sure

this IS a computer type mic
i'm iffy about using professional microphones with regular cheap cards - there are whole issues about impedance even if you can just use a couple radio shack adaptors

are you just testing in windows
the last time i did this for a friend it was really for audio chatting in msn messenger and it has it's own mic setup / levels and testing

if you have to try the motherboard sound
once you've removed all the existing sound stuff
AND rebooted back into windows with no-sound then reboot and
you have to go into the BIOS and enable the built-in sound

it's usually DEL when you boot up to get in there and sound should be on the Intergrated Peripherals page

FOR Goodness Sake !!!! -- hit ESC and Exit WITHOUT Saving from the bios unless you absolutely sure of what you changed and that you want it that way

You have to be extemely careful in there !!!

I'll download the manual from gigabyte and have a look

Have the Motherboard CD for the sound drivers handy - windows xp's hardware installer will ask for it
it should work fine - if not run the CD itself and the gigabyte setup program should have a driver install section

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MB sound connects ( left1 - spk , middle2 - line in , right3 - mic )

so in bios ( Integ. Perip. ) look for
AC97 Audio - set to Auto
OnBoard Legacy Audio - set Enabled
see page 65 in the online manual below ( details - bottom 67 and on pg 68 )
http://america.giga-byte.com/MotherB...zxe_e_1101.pdf

[henthorn]

It is obvious you know scads more than I do about this. I've been to the Gigabyte site with Mozilla, Netscape and IE and the manual would never load when I tried to call it up.

It will take me a while to get through your suggestions and help. Thanks. Will probably be back.