Solution to Weak Sound from Maono USB/XLR HD300T Microphone

 I bought a USB/XLR Dynamic Microphone "Maono HD-300T" from Amazon a few months ago and was disappointed with its low or quiet sound made by my Windows 11 when connected through its USB connection.  I tested the microphone through its XLR connection to my Yamaha Audio mixer, no phantom power is needed (as this is a dynamic microphone), but I had to set the preamp gain all the way to its max to get a decent volume.

The volume setting was set to 100%, but I had no luck making it better. I was thinking perhaps it required a special USB driver, but nope, it simply used the stock Windows driver (Maono's official website doesn't mention anything about a special driver for this particular model).

At one point I gave up on using it for my video conferences and meetings and back to just using the built-in microphone on my webcam (Logitech HD 920).  Last week I found an idea to test the microphone using my PC analog microphone input.  I found and bought an XLR-to-3.5mm TRS which is perfect to connect the microphone to my PC.  The good thing with built-in audio from motherboard is that Windows support boost gain to +30 dB, so I was able to make the microphone work properly.

Not being satisfied with that one solution, I googled around and found somebody mentioned about Equalizer APO and its accompanying UI interface, Peace Equalizer APO.  Got them installed and ran, I then connected my Microphone to one of my PC's USB.  After playing around on how to use it (It's a lot of parameter controls and kind of confusing, at least for beginners), I managed to boost the gain of the microphone to + 3- dB. Hooray!

Below is my settings (I saved it as "My Microphone mono" settings.  It is based on the "Microphone mono" preset configuration.):

Set the preamp to gain around +20 dB.  As can be seen, I turn on "Prevent Clipping" down below, so even if set it to the max (+30 dB gain), we shouldn't get the audio clipped.  The downside to crank it up to the max is we'd also get louder noise.

I configure the audio to live play back to its headphone connector (so I can hear my own voice for monitoring purposes):

The level is always set to 100% in this pane:

2.5 Gbps Ethernet slowing down

 I was having issues again with the unexpected slowness of my internet access.  This time turns out due to failure in ethernet auto-negotiation.  My PC's ethernet interface is 2.5 Gbps, as well MoCA adapter that is connected to it.  It was working fine, until yesterday, where I got only 90's Mbps on SpeedTest.

There is cool PowerShell command to display the link speed: Get-NetAdapter.

We can create a DOS shell wrapper, so invoking this from a regular DOS prompt would work.

For example, I put this command in a file called "getnet.ps1".  I created another DOS script called "getnet.cmd" with the content of it just calling getps1.ps1:

In getnet.ps1:

Get-NetAdapter

In getnet.cmd:

call getnet.ps1

For example:

C:\Users\anon\bin>type getnet.cmd

call getnet.ps1

C:\Users\lshih\bin>getnet

C:\Users\lshih\bin>call getnet.ps1

Name                      InterfaceDescription                    ifIndex Status       MacAddress             LinkSpeed

----                      --------------------                    ------- ------       ----------             ---------

Bluetooth Network Conn... Bluetooth Device (Personal Area Netw...      27 Disconnected 38-FC-98-13-E9-2A         3 Mbps

2.5 GigE LAN              Realtek Gaming 2.5GbE Family Contr...#2      21 Up           04-42-1A-0C-2C-C4       2.5 Gbps

vEthernet (2.5 GigE LAN)  Hyper-V Virtual Ethernet Adapter             16 Up           00-15-5D-76-F1-69        10 Gbps

vEthernet (1 GigE LAN)    Hyper-V Virtual Ethernet Adapter #3          52 Up           00-15-5D-D2-5B-EB        10 Gbps

1 GigE LAN                Intel(R) I211 Gigabit Network Conn...#2      14 Up           04-42-1A-0C-2C-C3         1 Gbps

vEthernet (VirtualBox ... Hyper-V Virtual Ethernet Adapter #2          40 Up           00-15-5D-F1-53-24        10 Gbps

VirtualBox Host-Only N... VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter         7 Up           0A-00-27-00-00-07         1 Gbps

vEthernet (WSL)           Hyper-V Virtual Ethernet Adapter #4          75 Up           00-15-5D-9C-4E-D0        10 Gbps

Chinese Hackers are now the top of the list

 My gateway router has a cool security feature called Intrusive Threat Prevention (ITS).  When I checked the statistics from where most of the attacks occurred to my gateway, majority the attacks come from China.