I have an old microphone that I haven’t used in over 2 years that I want to use. However I can’t get its plug to fit into any of the holes designed for it. I don’t remember how I used to hook it up a few years ago so i’m wondering is there any ‘general’ way that a microphone is hooked up to a computer or does it vary from computer to computer. Does it go into the same connector as the speaker by using a 2 way splitter, or do I need an adaptor to make the plug fit into one of the two other connectors.
The microphone input has it’s own connector. If there is none available, you could use the ‘Line in’ port, but the mic will need to be amplified.
Also, what kind of connector do you have on the mic? 1/4 phono plug? XLR (3 pin connector)? You may need adapters for these to work with your sound card.
1/4 phono plug. The plug is too large for the connector though so I figure I may need an adaptor to hook it up.
You’ll need an adaptor – expansion slots aren’t high enough to fit a 1/4" jack. The mic will be plugged into a jack on your sound card (if you have one) or somewhere else on the back of your computer (if you don’t). The correct jack will be labeled MIC or have a picture of a microphone, and unless your computer is very old it will be color-coded light purple.
After you connect the mic you may need to un-mute the microphone using your sound card’s mixer or the Windows volume control applet. (The mic may be under ‘advanced’ settings.) It’s a good idea to mute the mic when you’re not using it to avoid feedback and hearing background noise on your speakers. (Muting the CD audio input when you’re not using it is also a good idea because CD-ROM drives put out a lot of interference; you can often hear the drive’s motor on the CD audio input.)
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- Devices that have 1/4- and XLR jacks are usually the wrong impedance to plug straight into a mini-jack of anything. Mini-mic-jacks are almost always high-impedance single-sided, and stage equipment is low-impedance balanced. If your PC’s soundcard inputs are RCA connectors, then you have to find and read the soundcard manufacturer’s specs–RCA jacks could be either low or high.
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- There’s two ways to do this: use an adaptor, or use a preamp. The adaptors cost like $5 and are just an unpowered low-to-high-impedance signal transformer. If you want to use the stage mic because you think it would sound better than a cheap $2 PC mic, then I would advise you to skip even trying to use the $5 adaptor totally; I have never heard one that worked well on a PC. They kill all the treble in the signal, and knock the rest of the signal down quite a bit as well, and a typical PC soundcard mic input cannot cleanly amplify the level back up again. But anyway, it’s cheap to try and you might like it. Music stores sell them. Using this adaptor, you would connect the mic to the mic input of the PC.
- To use a preamp, you can use a guitar direct-input box if you have or can get one, they are a single-channel preamp that costs like $40 for cheap ones. There are also stereo-preamps built just for PC sound recording–the M-Audio AudioBuddy is one of the more popular+affordable ones, at $80. It has two channels and can run phantom power–but with these preamps, they boost the signal to line-level, so you connect these outputs to the PC’s line-in jack, not the mic jack. (Some soundcards, especially on laptops, only have one “input” jack. It usually works as a mic jack, but some are switchable in the OS to also function as line-input jacks)
- Or suppose you want to get a nice-sounding mic that you can plug straight into your PC’s soundcard. There’s at least one place online named Microphone Madness that makes some nice mini-mics that don’t cost much. Get a dynamic mic and it will shun background noise somewhat and it won’t sound so “crispy” as condenser PC mics will. Use the shortest cord you can with mini-mics, because the longer the cord is, the more high-end of the signal they lose.
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