Firstly, here is the hardware we are working with:

$ sudo lshw -C sound
  *-multimedia
       description: Audio device
       product: 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: 1b
       bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0
       version: 02
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
       configuration: driver=HDA Intel latency=0 module=snd_hda_intel

The PCI identifier of this specific model is 8086:284b. You can get this by lspci -n | grep "00:1b", but you’ll have to replace “00:1b” with your information from the previous lshw command. Thankfully getting this to work is rather simple, but involves fiddling with the track mixer and some switches. Needless to say it can take a while to figure out the right combination, but it involves 3 steps for my hardware.

First make sure you’re looking at all the information your sound device has to offer. Open the volume manager by right clicking the icon and selecting “Open Volume Control”, then click the “Preferences” button near the bottom and make sure you have all the items selected:

Now make sure that the proper input method has been selected by choosing the “Options” tab in the Volume Control window. Mine had to be set to “Analog Inputs”, but the default Input Source of “Mic” worked for me with my internal microphone:

Lastly go to the “Recording” tab and make sure the slider for your capture device is all the way up:

With my hardware the “Mux” amplifies the microphone volume. Putting it all the way down makes the sound input very weak, but putting it all the way up makes it heavily distorted. I have found a decent balance for my recording environment and sound device, so make sure to test the actual sound with Applications » Sound & Video » Sound Recorder.

If you’re using Skype it might help you to know you may have to manually select your sound device from the menu. For me this was the first option on the list for both my Input and Output device in the Sound Device options. I blame all of this on PulseAudio, which so far has been nothing but headache, undelivered results, and a waste of time.