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Comments on How can I plug in both a microphone and speaker to a laptop with a single 3.5 mm jack?
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How can I plug in both a microphone and speaker to a laptop with a single 3.5 mm jack?
My dad has a Lenovo Y700 laptop with only one 3.5 mm jack (green arrow in pic). He uses this laptop for video calls.
He must use the single jack for speakers, because it is impossible to hear people clearly with the laptop's own, shoddy speakers. That means for a microphone, he must use the laptop's builtin mic, which produces terrible audio quality for the other person.
He has Zalman ZM-MIC1, but how can he plug in both this mic, and the speaker?
I am hoping to avoid buying additional microphones, because we already have 5 spare standalone microphones and wish to save money.
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He sees just 2 3.5mm audio jacks — see my green arrows. Correct?
No, clearly not. Since both holes are different sizes, at most one of them can be 3.5 mm.
It's hard to tell absolute sizes in your picture, but if any of the two holes is 3.5 mm, it would be the left one. The right hole looks too small.
If you have a microphone with a plug that fits into a hole that is marked as audio input, give it a try. It is quite unlikely that anything would get electrically damaged in that case. Make sure not to plug a microphone into an audio output port. That could damage the microphone.
If this doesn't work, consult the user manual for your laptop. Surely that tells you what kind of microphone, if any, the unit can accept. Then go out and get that kind of microphone. These things are cheap and available nowadays. It shouldn't cost more than a few cups of coffee.
But he already plugged his external speakers into it!
Then it's clearly an audio output, not an input. Microphones need to be plugged into inputs. The signals are coming from the microphone and going into the computer.
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