I’m pretty sure not many would confuse the 1/8" soundcard socket microphones with anything on an XLR. I know quite a few people that would like to confuse them. I did make two adapters so I could plug my unbalanced lavaliers into my XLR mixer. The lavaliers have local battery, so I never ran into the power cross problems.
The Shure FP-33 field mixer will switch between 12 old style and 48 with little switches on the motherboard. Amaze your friends.
This mixer model is hard to kill. I believe this is the one that went on a sound shoot inside a speeding cigarette boat in Florida’s Biscayne Bay (I have the button layout stuck to the bottom). That wasn’t me. Wrong coast. I believe the shotgun microphone was never reliable after that.
It satisfies the old joke of being a successful product. Most of the paint is gone and you can’t read the knobs and dials any more. You can’t see it right now because it’s out on a job.
Koz
Hey Remote,
I have exactly the same microphone. It’s not the expected behaviour that the microphone is recording at such a low level. If you connect your headphone to the monitor jack you realize the microphone itself is able to record the birds from the next street. The microphone uses a board from XMOS (http://www.xmos.com) and the XMOS USB Audio 2.0 Stereo Driver version 3.34.0 is the latest driver you can get from sE Electronics. The driver is developed by Thesycon (http://www.thesycon.com) and the product is called “TUSBAudio” (Thesycon USB Audio). They state the driver is compatible with Windows 10 and yes, it works but even if you drag the level slider to 100% it’s still too quiet. There is no boost functionality available.
I just recorded directly in front of my speakers where I played a song at normal loudness (something you can hear 
); have a look at the attachment. When I amplify that so I can hear something it sounds horrible. With voice it’s not too bad because, well, my voice is horrible anyway, but this is clearly not ok.
The SE-X1 USB is now a legacy product. My advise is to create a support ticket at https://www.seelectronics.com/get-in-touch/
I have several other USB microphones and none have this problem. My first USB microphone was the Auna MIC-900B which I still have as of today. If I turn the level slider to 100% I can record the birds from outside. I always set the slider to 90% or even lower with that one.
So please open a support ticket at sE Electronics. Your microphone is broken and not working as expected. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IpZ3zGplLI ← have a look; he’s not “eating” the microphone and still getting decent loudness. If you follow the video you can even see that he’s setting the level to 60% 
. And he can even record his guitar with it. This is clearly not possible with my SE-X1 USB. The best you can hope is they are replacing it with the SE-X1 (the one with the xlr connection). I followed the SE-X1 and SE-X1 USB for some time. When the USB variant was released, it was more expensive than the one with the XLR connection. That quickly changed and the XLR variant was more expensive than the USB one. The USB one quickly dropped to 100 USD (sE Electronics nearly asked 300 USD when they released it).
I suspect it’s a driver problem. The russian guy in this youtube video uses Windows 7. For me this was my last USB microphone .
Regards,
Andreas.
oh dear, I found the solution! In the properties of your microphone, switch to the “Enhancements” tab and check “Loudness Equalization”…if it’s activated it records just fine with normal levels even at 90% and lower.
OK, but.
I don’t trust features and enhancements that “magically” fix problems like this. Depending on what your show is, you might want to find out if if there is something waiting in a dark corner to jump out at you.
Announce a short paragraph or two or three sentences and then just stop dead and try not to breathe too loudly for about 30 seconds. What happens to the track when you play it back? Does it slowly shoosh louder and louder “looking” for your voice? Does it start getting louder and then suddenly drop to total silence?
The earlier low volume you were experiencing is more or less about normal and I expect it to be stable. Whatever you put in comes out with no tricks.
Koz
The earlier low volume you were experiencing is more or less about normal and I expect it to be stable.
if normal means that one can’t barely record anything at level 100% then yes . But as I said; if you plug your headphone into the monitor jack, you can hear things far far away. So mechanically the microphone is capable to grasp sound. But something inside XMOS is what’s broken; or even a software / firmware bug.
In the meantime the sE Electronics support called back and they confirmed this isn’t the normal behaviour for this microphone. They asked me to send it in for a repair. I believed my “Loudness Equalization” fixed the problem but I did another test; I recorded an instrument and the sound was horrible. So this “Loudness Equalization” really just is a poor mans software amplifier.
I’m done with USB . Good sE Electronics isn’t producing any USB devices anymore.
Regards,
Andreas.