Audacity Forum

I wish you all a good day Audacity community
I'm very interested in recording generally and I have big passion for heavy, agressive music as well and so I plan to buy a dynamic microphone, with XLR/6.3mm jack cable and I have one (big) problem, literally I must look like complete noob right now but oh well.. I need to know before I buy this dynamic microphone if it wil work when I plug it to my notebook (of course through the adapter to 3.5mm jack) with Realtek High Definition Audio soundcard (yeah, lame) which has one port for headphones and microphone as well.. It's Acer Aspire E11 (E3-111) running on Windows 8.1 but I plan on installing Ubuntu Studio for wider choices of recording.

So my question is:
Will it work and record?

Also sorry for my lame asking but are there some complications or things I need to know about stereo and mono? But the cable and adapter must be definetly a mono one yeah? Even notebook is stereo

Microphone: http://defender-global.cz/multimedia-gv ... %20Mic-130
Notebook: http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/series/aspire-e11

And yeah I'm foreign so sorry if you don't completely understand me...

Pulling up the user manual for that notebook it appears to have a single 1/8" phone jack for "headset" (ie headphones and microphone). Probably a 4-conductor TRRS style. (The manual mentions headsets such are used with smart phones). There are multiple standards for this connection.

IF you can find the appropriate adapter (here's an example of one type: http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-MUYH ... B004SP0WAQ) then yes that microphone should work -- but will likely be limited by the quality of the preamp in the laptop as to noise and distortion.

The Microphone input is almost certainly mono only. (But the headphone outputs on the same jack are probably stereo).

There are a number of small USB audio interfaces and USB Mixers on the market for under US$100. Typically have a single microphone input, a single instrument input, headphone jack, and sometimes line input/outputs as well. You may find one of those a good investment.

There is one oddity about using a simple adapter like the StarTech unit. It does what it says it does, split off a computer microphone from a standard pair of stereo headphones, but that's not the microphone you have. Your microphone does not use all the little connections in the socket and some computers care about that. Some care enough that they stop working. My experience (so far) is two out of five recorders didn't like crossing the connections.

Then, if you do get it to work, as above, you only get the Skype quality of the microphone electronics, not necessarily music or entertainment quality.

Then there's the microphone type. True. Dynamic microphones do very well with high volume screaming performances, but the physical microphone is only half of the job. From there the signal goes to the microphone preamplifier or MicPre. It does no good when the microphone is flexing its muscles if the MicPre is cowering in the corner and bleeding from overload, clipping and distortion. To really pull this off requires a mixer (attached).

The Trim control takes care of balancing hot microphones, and the other two controls adjust the performance with other microphones or your performance and any overdubbing you may want.

Koz