Microphone delay when recording in Windows 7

I don't understand exactly how this forum works, but since this is one working answer, I'm going to post information for those of us using VIA as a response to this question.

Via recently released a new audio driver (Aug. 4th, 2010) that completely eliminates this issue. (1) Go to www.via.com.tw and find the driver for whichever sound card you're inflicted with, and install the driver. (2) Go to Sound>Speaker instead of saying HD Audio, the speakers now say VIA HD Audio, go to Properties>Levels and unmute the input you wish to use. (3) Make sure you're not listening to the device.

Now to try and make everything play nice with my Creative card... almost pissed my pants laughing at that concept. Can't even set up the installer program right...

Ok, so now that we've established the fact that "Listen to device" is not for real-time microphone output then what is?

How can I get real-time output without delay? I've used headphones with my mic to help with my singing classes and never had problems with delay on XP.

I do not have a mic level under the speakers tab. This is driving me insane. :(

We established a lot of facts actually, for instance, that we are not mind readers nor fortune tellers, we can't hack into your computer to know which sound card you have, that will be a pretty good start to solve the problem.

198 messages in this thread and we still have to explain that, without enough info, we can't help.

Good news, everyone! I have found a rather simple solution  from another site. Its not a bug at all. Just mixed up features and i am supprised microsoft tech's could not solve this hehe

I am surprised you audiophiles were unable to find the reason for the delay! I too began by selecting the "Listen to this device" checkbox in the microphone's property dialog. I loved the feature and how it adds the microphone to the new Mixer, but I was very disappointed at the ~1/5 second audio lag that I was experiencing. I plugged in my headphones and tried it again. For reference, I am using an IBM ThinkPad T42p which uses SoundMax Integrated Digital Audio under the plain old AC'97 codec. The very first thing I noticed with the headphones on (aside from the delay itself) was that my voice sounded a bit more 'rounded off' and softened. This lead me to believe that the delay is being caused by post-processing of the incoming audio. Since Windows 7 also has much more advanced integrated speech recognition features, I would figure that such things as echo cancellation would play a part in it too.

As Chris stated "The "listen to" feature wasn't designed for this scenario.". With some thought, I figured this to be true; especially considering the text above the checkbox states "You can listen to a portable music player or other device through this Microphone jack". I unchecked the box and looked elsewhere. Although the Windows audio stack has been completely rebuilt, it still retains the basic functionality of the old Volume Control from Windows XP; the controls have just been made more modular for further customization possibilities. Here is what I did:

-Open the Sound dialog through Control Panel or by right clicking the audio tray icon and clicking "Playback Devices"-Open the Properties dialog for your Speakers (your device may be different, considering how Windows 7 seems to handle different kinds of hardware)-Click the Levels tab-Unmute the microphone-Apply and close

With the "Listen" option disabled, this solved my problem. No delay and back to the crisp, direct audio I had before! Hopefully, it will work for everyone else experiencing this issu

It would great if this worked. The thing is, I don't have a Microphone section to unmute.