Karaoke: why the volume of microphone is so low through my computer speaker

Assume you bought a nice microphone for Karaoke (not those crap computer microphones used for web chat), you realize that the plug doesn’t fit into the 3.5” hole on the sound card, so you bought an adapter, but the volume of microphone is so low through my computer speaker. However those crap computer microphones have louder sound. What happened?

There is an article “interfacing professional microphones to computer sound cards” to explain the details. http://dcco.cc/ref_microphones.pdf

Solution?

1. You need a sound mixer to amplify the output and RCA to 3.5” Y cable to connect mixer to sound card input

• Four channel stereo mixer in Radio Shack http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2102920
• Behringer Minimix Mix800 Ultra-Compact Karaoke Machine with Voice Cancellor And Fx.
• Behringer 1002FX Xenyx Premium 10-Input 2-Bus Mixer with Xenyx Mic Preamps And British Eqs

2. Or you can buy a USB microphone. USB microphone actually has built-in sound card, but there are some limitations such as you can’t easily connect to microphones to the computer.

3. Microphone output over HDMI or optical? You have to look for more expensive sound card with “DTS Interactive” or “Dolby Digital Live”