Logitech Microphone (AK5370) inaudible volume

Here is the top rated 1 star review for your microphone.

Me and my friend both ordered the same mic from Amazon on the same day. They arrived soon after. But the one I received was a faulty one and the microphone's gain is extremely low.

My friend's mic seemed to operate fine. So we swapped the units and checked that it wasn't something to do with our computers. And that mic was still faulty. So I returned mine and got a replacement unit. But unfortunately the replacement unit I received was also faulty!

If you Google "Logitech mic gain too low", you can find a whole forum on Logitech's website where people have the issue and let me tell you, it's nothing to do with the OS as people might tell you. We have tried 2 faulty units on OS X 10.8, OS X 10.7, Win 7, Win 8 and it looks like a design issue in certain batches at least.

It looks like you got one of the faulty microphones.

I have the same microphone and it's (now) working fine. On reading your post I found mine had stopped working (weird analogue noise but no signal) since upgrading to 12.04, but a restart and leaving it plugged in for boot fixed this.

Make sure you install pavucontrol if you haven't got it (I think they stopped shipping it by default a while back, but maybe this has changed). It's still the most effective way of "debugging" any Pulse-but-not-ALSA recording problems. It also allows you to turn the gain up past 100%, which is what you might need here.

Hope that helps. It's a great mic too for the price :)

I'm posting this in hopes that someone else realizes what I didn't:

This microphone has a green button on it. You need to press it to turn it on. I spent probably 30 minutes debugging the same issue in this question; I could see only a very small gain on the mic. Then I looked down, pressed the button, and smashed my head into my desk.