Microphone Incredibly Quiet, Realtek Audio Drivers not fixing it

[flamezombie]

I'm running a Dell Inspiron 15 7000 laptop (1050ti, 8GB DDR4 RAM, 256Gb SSD, 7th gen i5) that I recently bought and found a few issues with the audio. With the native driver installed, any speaker I had plugged in would constantly pop, so I updated to the Realtek Audio Drivers which fixed that problem but introduced a new one. The microphone volume is abysmal. I can blow into it or tap it to get a few bars to show up, but regular speaking does nothing. This is not a hardware issue; it works fine on the previous drivers and other computers but obviously I cannot revert to those as they have their own, arguably more annoying issues.

Any help is much appreciated, thanks.

 

[flamezombie]

I have solved it in a kind of roundabout way; I installed the previous version of the Realtek audio codecs (drivers) and that has """"fixed"""" the microphone issue. Audio quality is still not great, however. It picks up just about everything even with software enabled echo cancellation (multichannel, any setting) and it's not the mic; it only does this on this laptop. And there's a subtle popping and crackle occasionally.