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?