Windows 10 No microphone will work

Hoping maybe someone can help me here because I am at a loss.

For the life of me, I cannot get a microphone to work on my computer anymore. Plug in or USB. At one point or another they worked, but then suddenly stopped. I've tried disabling/uninstalling all microphones and reinstalling/re-enabling and nothing has worked. The only thing that ever worked was the microphone on my webcam, which I uninstalled to see if there was interference.

I have an ASUS Xonar DSX sound card with the front panel connector plugged into it. This problem also existed with no sound card and using onboard sound. I've plugged in an Insignia USB microphone, which worked for a little time but now it won't work.

All things I've tried have shown up in device manager and on Recording Devices. I'm getting no green bars for the microphone no matter how I set it up. The best idea I can see on what may be wrong is on this screenshot. As you can see, the Wave device under Recording is showing bars that are changing with the speaker output. I've seen this sort of behavior when I've tried other things, where the speaker output is being 'emulated' by a recording device.



Anyone have any ideas?

Another screenshot in case it helps.

Hi makesense. Just out of curiosity could you open Device Manager and select Show Hidden Devices and Scan for Hardware Changes? The reason that I ask is that since I installed the AU I've had sound issues. They weren't like yours but maybe they have the same root cause. The AU installed duplicate devices, in my case a hidden Dell Monitor with built in speakers. No sound would play on the real Dell monitor because Windows kept trying to install sound drivers in the phantom one but because the phantom monitor wasn't plugged in the driver install could never complete. I solved it by discovering the hidden Dell monitor and then deleting it. Maybe something like this is happening to you. It's probably a long shot but its worth a try.

I, too had mic problems until I discovered the mic switch set to "off". Turned it on, and voila!

retreaded said:

I, too had mic problems until I discovered the mic switch set to "off". Turned it on, and voila!

If only that is something I hadn't tried. Would have saved me tons of time. :)

SoFine409 said:

Hi makesense. Just out of curiosity could you open Device Manager and select Show Hidden Devices and Scan for Hardware Changes? The reason that I ask is that since I installed the AU I've had sound issues. They weren't like yours but maybe they have the same root cause. The AU installed duplicate devices, in my case a hidden Dell Monitor with built in speakers. No sound would play on the real Dell monitor because Windows kept trying to install sound drivers in the phantom one but because the phantom monitor wasn't plugged in the driver install could never complete. I solved it by discovering the hidden Dell monitor and then deleting it. Maybe something like this is happening to you. It's probably a long shot but its worth a try.

I checked and there were no duplicates of anything. Just for fun, I uninstalled the drivers for the audio from my monitor just in case, but no change.

makesense said:

I checked and there were no duplicates of anything. Just for fun, I uninstalled the drivers for the audio from my monitor just in case, but no change.

Well it was a long shot at best. I'm sorry it didn't help. I'm not really an expert in this area but it's very likely another forum member will stop by and give you better help than I have. One last thought though; did you try running the windows hardware and device troubleshooter? I think there is a tutorial showing how to run the troubleshooters. It may just find the problem. I believe that it will show you a log of the things that it checks for; that might help in trying future fixes.

It never has been able to find the problem. It doesn't appear to be a detection issue, but the fact that a USB microphone doesn't work either makes me think there is some conflict. Don't know if there is a way to dig deeper on resource use that would work.

On the All Apps click on Windows Administrative Tools, then System Information. Under System Summary you can see hardware resources with conflicts/sharing, DMAs, Forced Hardware, I/O, IRQs, etc. this should be very helpful to you. Let me know how it goes.

Another thought which I'm sure you tried, using another USB port?

SoFine409 said:

On the All Apps click on Windows Administrative Tools, then System Information. Under System Summary you can see hardware resources with conflicts/sharing, DMAs, Forced Hardware, I/O, IRQs, etc. this should be very helpful to you. Let me know how it goes.

Another thought which I'm sure you tried, using another USB port?

Thought maybe you had something. My sound card was sharing an IRQ with a trackpad (I'm on a PC so no trackpad). But, sadly, nothing changed after uninstalling that trackpad and restarting.

Multiple USB ports for the USB microphone were also tested.