Assuming it's a standard 3.5mm audio jack (and not something like a cabled USB plug or even a bluetooth-to-USB-dongle setup) have you got any
other audio devices that can take its input (dictaphone, perhaps a mobile phone that hasn't gone the proprietary connector root) through which you can debug what's what? Or another person's laptop?
Not sure about your removal of the mic from the headphones, because all mic/headphone combo sets I've had have been inseparable short of (possibly damaging) dissassembly.
Also, mics, regardless of the headset (sometimes stereo; sometimes mono, especially just-one-ear versions) are
only mono. Overwhelmingly, at least, unless you've got something
very fancy. I suspect that the mic jack is of a mono-form (
the second in this image) rather than stereo (the third in that image) and it's the socket that's stereo-capable but isn't connecting properly with the internal left-leg that would normally be electrically equivalent to the right leg.
So now the question is have you got any
other mics you can test? (The laptop mic is inbuilt, I presume, so not available to plug in, similarly, in any way.) It could easily be a bit of fluff stuck in the socket (I keep having to extract fluff from my tablet's headphone-out port, from the bottom of the various pockets it gets slid into) that at one point misaligned it to not work at all but now is merely misaligning it to the current problem. If it's exactly the same then I'd be seriously peering into the socket with some illumination (which you can do
anyway, but before you think it is the problem you can spend ages trying to look there without thinking you
ought to see something).
Cleaning anything out is tricky. I use a pin, the
head, not the point, to carefully see if I can 'hook' any fibres out of the recesses with the "mushroom head" shape, but I know it's possible to damage the innards. Caveats apply, which is why I'd encourage you to
see the fluff before picking away with increasing severity in hopes of finding it. It may be possible to damage the make-to-detect microswitch or alternate centre-pin detection at the base of the socket hole that governs the behaviour of the switch (mechanically or logically) to override the inbuilt mic, that's obvioysly working.
The other option to inward sound being only on the right channel is that you've moved the (software) setting stereo bias full over when you were trying to fiddle the (for other reasons?) original non-workingness. Having inadvertently repaired the original issue (e.g. switching off and on again, having cleared the badly set bit in the driver's working memory) you are now suffering from your other fiddlings. But I don't think that's likely for you to have missed (seen it and fiddled with it while fiddling, missed it entirely when re-fiddling), just putting it out there.
That's the sort of sequence of investigation I'd attempt if you brought it to me with that problem (maybe without quite so readily poking the socket, if it wasn't my device to take my own risks with). If the tests come up weird (
only that mic works improperly with
only that laptop, every other combination working and there being no obvious physical difference between plugs to perhaps be a borderline failure with the inscrutable insides of the slightly different laptop socket) then I'd have to look for another approach. Ditto if I'm wrong about it being a 3.5-phono connector from the start. (But if it's a composite stereo-out/mono-in three-channel 3.5 plug handling all audio IO in one ("TRRS", Tip/Ring/Ring/Sleeve, or even "TRRRS" with another ring) then it could yet be the same as per misalignment, but I'm not entirely sure which Rs and which of the T and S actually does what, without looking it up of hooking one up to test.)
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Topic: The Generic Computer Advice Thread (Read 573245 times)