So I recently bought me a soundcard, the Claro Halo XT. It's nice. Along with the nice sound I was hoping the microphone port on it would be better than my motherboards onboard audio. My motherboard is the Gigabyte Z77-UD5H and my CPU is the i7-3770K. Before the soundcard was installed I was using another CPU, the i3 3240. Hope that's all the relevent info as far as hardware goes.
When I talk to people in voip via Skype, Teamspeak, or whatever they can hear my computer audio. At first I thought this was bleeding through from my headphones to my mic or from my speakers to my mic. It happens. Turning my audio down didn't change anything for them, which I thought was very odd. I also have a Tascam US-144MKII in my audio setup. It has a left and right input on it that I feed my computer audio through. It has a built in soundcard that I use when making music with FL Studio or when I talk to people making it my output speaker for communications. There's a nice little knob on there that allows me to hear the input passing through and I use it to crossfade how much voice I hear to computer audio. Makes it really nice. At first I thought this was transmitting my computer audio through, but completely unplugging my computer from the inputs didn't change the fact that the person on the other end could hear my audio.
I was dumbfounded, still am. I've checked all settings for stereomix and various other things, but the microphone itself in the control panel shows my computer audio being fed through and I can't figure out why. I thought it might just be faulty audio on the mobo and figured after I got a soundcard it would change. But the exact same thing was happening. With an expensive soundcard as this I figure this is NOT a hardware issue but some problem going on with my software. I looked everywhere. Googled for hours to find people having the same problem with solutions that apparently helped them but not me. Or just people not having any idea how to fix this. I've asked friends, anyone I can think of. Not a soul on the internet knows how to fix this and I find that hard to believe.
I also tried using the microphone port on my case as it is now plugged into the Claro Halo as well. But it didn't even recognize that I plugged anything in. I'm sure I need to investigate that a bit more but I won't worry about it really.
I did find a solution, and this solution should only have to be a temporary solution. Basically i'm using the motherboard audio for my microphone only now. This stops the audio being transmitted, but I feel like I shouldn't have to have a dedicated soundcard for my microphone to get results that I clearly should have right off the bat.
So while I do have the problem solved I would like to know if there's a way to rig it up the way I know it should be able to. It doesn't make much sense to me.
If it helps, i'm using an xbox headset plugged in through an adapter for my mic. I don't have another mic and I refuse to use a headset when I have Audio Technica ATH-M50s headphones. Standalone mics are next to impossible to find anymore it seems.