Hi, I recently bought a sennheiser e845 mic and am planning to record using my pc. I can't seem to get any sound through it though. I have a Dell dimension 4600 pc with a pink mic input and a blue line-in input on the rear of the tower. I have tried using the mic in cubase, audacity and even the windows own sound recorder to get a level but no luck. Can anyone help me please? I have an XLR to Jack cable and am also using a mini-jack converter on the jack end and then plugging into the mic input of my pc. Is this where my problem is? I have also tried in the line-in input but this doesn't work either. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Cheers.
Firstly I would check to make sure that the MIC input is not muted. The easiest way to locate this is the little speaker icon in the system tray and double click it. Once you do that, it will bring up what looks like a very rudimentary mixing desk. Here you will find slider bars on the various input and output sources on your machine. Locate the one that is labeled MIC and make sure that the mute button is not ticked. Also, I would set the slider vol. bar to a little less than halfway. That is given that the software and drivers for your sound card have been installed ok. Now on to the MIC side. If I have read and understood this correctly, the MIC has the XLR output. If I am not wrong, this type of MIC needs power supplied by the XLR connection to operate. I believe they call this "phantom powered". Have a look at the owners manual for your MIC to see if this is the case. If it is, then you would need to supply power to the MIC somehow as the MIC jack on the sound card will not be supplying the power. You may have to use a different MIC in this case. Good luck
Did you ever get this issue resolved? I would guess that a possible problem might be the microphone requiring Phantom power, as a computer doesn't provide phantom power via the microphone port by default - at least I don't think it does. If that is the case, you may need an in between device, like a mini-mixer of sorts.
Yeah thanks. Had a look about the net and decided to purchase an M-Audio Fast Track USB interface. Working like a dream now. It's all USB powered so just plug it in and you've got a mic preamp built in. XLR and 1/8 jack connections included on it too. Recommend it! Thanks for your help
