X220, Win8.1, and Microphone

[mbressman]

I updated my X220 to Win8.1 relatively recently, and aside from battery issues, I thought everything was OK. Unfortunately, I've come to realize that there seem to be issues with the microphone. I'm not sure if these are related to the Win8.1 update or could possibly be hardware issues instead. Basically, there appear to be two issues:

1) The microphone quality is terrible. When sitting normally in front of my laptop and attempting to do a sound recording (or be on a VoIP call via Google Hangouts, RingCentral, or Skype), practically nothing I say is picked up by the microphone.

2) The mute microphone button above the keyboard doesn't seem to work anymore - or even light up when it is being pushed.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[dr_st]

FWIW, the microphone mute button works for me on X220 with Win8.1. I don't recall installing any special things for it, but I did install all the Windows updates and it's possible some of those included drivers. I do not have the communication toolbox installed (Fn+F6), but I did install the Hotkey software for Windows 8.

As far as microphone quality goes, I am not sure (I don't really use the microphone much for anything). Maybe the volume is set too low?

[peraklo]

i can confirm both... tried using skype the other day for video call, ended up using my smartphone and skype app. It was totaly unusable.

[peraklo]

Any news or solutions to this problem?

[mbressman]

Weirdly enough, I had installed the PM driver from Lenovo's website, but in looking at my Device Manager it didn't seem to be working - I reinstalled it, and for some reason the PM driver seemed to fix the microphone mute button.

Unfortunately, it hasn't done much to fix the audio recording quality. I booted back into my Win7 installation (original installation from when I got the machine years ago) and tried recording some audio files using Win 7's sound recorder and they recorded and played back fine. Then, I booted into Win8 (which is running on an mSATA SSD drive I bought and installed) and tried again with sound recorder, and while it seems slightly better, it's still very poor quality.

Anyone with ideas on how I can fix that since it seems to be a software issue? Thanks.

[mbressman]

I think I solved it (or rather, ChuckyL (and some previous posters) did : https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-T ... 609/page/4 ):

- Under Signal Enhancements, unchecked "Enable audio enhancements"

- Microphone level set to 15
- Microphone boost set to +20.0 dB

[dr_st]

Awesome! Thanks for reporting back.