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New to the forum and hopefully someone can help me out. Not sure if this is the stack to be asking this on or not, sorry if not.

I'm trying to setup a system that will allow me to record meetings in a hall. The setup has the mics going in to and speakers going out of a mixing desk. I can get the sound to come out of the laptop into the mixing desk and out to the speakers fine, but when I try to hook up the mixing desk so that the sound is coming into the laptop using a combo audio adaptor the quality is just unusable.

What I need is: The ability to play audio from the laptop Record audio on the laptop (through the built-in mic isn't good enough quality). It will also be used for Skype so that people who are at home can join a call and hear the meeting.

Anyone got any idea on what's wrong? If the audio jack isn't going to do it what are my other options?

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  • Describing the audio as "unusable" provides no useful information for us to help you with your problem. Is it too loud (clipped, distorted)? Is it too low (barely audible, too much noise, etc.)? Do you have a proper cable to allow you to use the "combo jack" on your Ideapad 305 for both audio output AND audio input? What mixing desk in the hall are you talking about? (Make and model) Exactly which input and output connectors on the mixing desk did you use? How did you have it connected to your Ideapad 305? What cable exactly were you using? Without those details we can offer only broad, non-sp
    – Richard Crowley
    Dec 2, 2016 at 4:56
  • Here is some more information: sound.stackexchange.com/questions/27539/… This is a fairly common getting-started issue.
    – user9881
    Dec 12, 2016 at 21:22
  • yah i picked up a little mixer that is powered by usb and sends audio by same usb cable....works great
    – Ray Shaw
    Dec 20, 2016 at 16:16

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you're probably plugging a line level signal into a mic level input. I would purchase a USB sound adapter/interface that accepted XLR line level input. That will certainly help get you on the right track. Your other options is to attenuate the signal coming out of the mixing desk, but this will be fiddly if you are not sure what this is.

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  • That is exactly what I was doing. I've now purchased a Behringer UCA202 which has been getting good reviews. I'll be testing this weekend so hopefully all be good.
    – Alex Goldie
    Dec 8, 2016 at 11:06

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