Some microphone woes

[Dark Avorian]

So...I recently a bought a pair of Skullcandy ink'd headphones with line in mic because they're pretty cheap and half decent and easy to find. I'm on a Dell Studio 15__ laptop running vista...and it seems that no matter what I fool with I cannot get the mic to function. I want to use it for like speaking to videochats and recording crappy voice quality...

[Meem1029]

What have you tried to get it to work? Can your system recognize that you have a mic plugged in and receive signals from it and it just an application issue, or is the system not seeing it? Have you checked in your system settings to make sure that it's not muted? Does the laptop have a webcam with a microphone built in? If so, does that work?

[Endless Mike]

Are you sure your laptop's input can accept the microphone part of the miniplugz.

[Dream]

Look at the headphone jack itself. Does it have three rings, or two? If it is three, your computer will need to have a combination headphone/mic jack, which most don't. If it doesn't, I'm afraid you're out of luck, unless you want to get handy and solder on a pair of mini jacks to split the signals. The three ring connectors are more commonly associated with phones, and you might test the headphones in someone's phone to make sure they work.

[EvanED]

Look at the headphone jack itself. Does it have three rings, or two? If it is three, your computer will need to have a combination headphone/mic jack, which most don't. If it doesn't, I'm afraid you're out of luck, unless you want to get handy and solder on a pair of mini jacks to split the signals. The three ring connectors are more commonly associated with phones, and you might test the headphones in someone's phone to make sure they work.

Just to be clear, Dream's "rings" are the insulators, so his "three rings, or two" is like asking whether it has "four conductors, or three". You could probably figure that out for yourself, but I just wanted to make sure there could be no confusion.

[Dream]

I thought about the ambiguity, got lazy, and submitted the post. Ah well

[freakish777]

running vista

[jerkface]Not sure this is a hardware issue[/jerkface]


Sorry, couldn't resist.