Samuel Sieb wrote:
>> It's a USB sound device sampling an analog source (your
>> microphone).  A digital input would be something like SPDIF.

Anil Felipe Duggirala:
> Thanks Samuel. That makes it clearer to me, now I just need to find
> out what SPDIF is and how different input devices fall into those two
> categories.

Wikipedia...

Analogue inputs (varying voltages) go into microphone and line-level
inputs, digital data go into data inputs (SPDIF being one kind, that
can either be an electrical signal over wiring, or an optical signal
through glass fibre-optics or plastic cabling.

You'll see SPDIF (a consumer variety of digital audio) on the outputs
of CD, DVD and Bluray players, the inputs of some amplifiers, and
inputs or outputs on some modern TV sets.  And on some audio production
hardware (effects devices, typically).

>> No, it should be a voice saying whatever is written for the button 
>> you're pressing.  e.g. "front left"  If you're getting static, 
>> something isn't working.  What output options do you have for that
>> device?

> I don't know what you mean by "output options". 

With the pulseaudio sound preferences window on Gnome, and Gnome-like,
desktops, the hardware tab has a choice of hardware it finds, and a
test speakers button.  It will pop up another window allowing you to
hear spoken test announcements on individual speakers (or earphones).

Other desktop interfaces should have something *similar* (i.e. a bit of
exploring may be needed if you use a different desktop).


> The test button says "Mono". This device's sound output comes into a
> single earphone, with mono sound. However, clicking on the button
> makes a short (~2 seconds) static sound.

From time to time I get random heavily distorted sounds on some
devices, that otherwise work well.  As best I can work out, it's not my
hardware, but poor driving of it.

> The mic appears to be working fine. I tested it with the Gnome sound
> recorder and skype. However, the mic "volume" level appears to be
> pretty low. It is set to almost max in my Sound settings, but the
> recorded audio is still at a low level.

I get a similar thing with audio hardware on various computers:

I have multi-input sound capture USB devices (Behringer Uphoria UMC1820
and a UMC404HD), that if I use Audacity to interface *directly* with
them, give me good sound input (and often faulty playback).  If I drive
any of the inputs up to maximum, the waveform will only begin to clip
at full-scale (as it should).

But, if anything tries to go through pulse-audio in the middle, the
captured signal is half volume.  I can drive the input stages right up
to 100%, but only get around half-scale out of pulse-audio.  Trying to
drive them harder only distorts, I cannot get full amplitude audio
capture through pulseaudio.

With Audacity, I can bypass pulseaudio, but other things (e.g. Zoom)
don't have that ability.  So streaming audio is always far too quiet.

And, yes, I have looked at alsamixer, and other pulseaudio mixer
options, it's not an attenuated input, it's not being captured
properly.
 
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