I just got a Corsair HS50 headset, which is a set of headphones with a detachable microphone. The microphone connects to the headphones via an ordinary 3-pin jack. There is only one wire coming out of the headset: a 4-pin connector. My PC is an Acer Aspire 3, and it's only got one jack. The jack on the PC is illustrated with a little icon of a headset (headphones with attached microphone), so presumably it's a 4-pin jack. However, when I plug the headset into this jack, the headphones work fine but the PC doesn't detect the attached microphone. It only detected the PC's built-in microphone, and used it on Skype.
So I got a Tecknet USB Audio Adapter, which plugs into a USB port on the PC and has separate red and green jacks for inputs. I plugged the 4-pin headset connector into a splitter cable and plugged the two 3-pin connectors at the other end of the splitter into the adapter.
Then the headphones continued to work fine and the PC detected the microphone. However, on Skype the microphone was so soft that I couldn't be heard. I checked the sound settings and it was set to 100% sensitivity, detected as a USB audio device.
I restarted my PC and went onto Discord. I checked to see that both my PC and Discord were using the USB audio device, and they said they were. But they can't have been, for at least two reasons. First, when I tapped on the microphone or blew into it, other people on Discord didn't hear anything. And second, most importantly, the headset has a mute button for the microphone, and whether it was clicked on or clicked off, the people on Discord heard me exactly the same. So they must have been hearing me through the PC's built-in microphone, despite the fact that both the PC and Discord claimed to be using the USB audio device for a microphone.
Does anybody know how to fix this issue?
EDIT 1: I have followed David Postill's advice in the comment below but it did not change the problem. I also plugged the headset straight into my PC's jack (without using the USB audio adapter) once I'd installed the iCUE software as per that advice, and the problem remained exactly the same.
EDIT 2: Once I installed new audio drivers on my PC, the headset started working. The problem was that it took several restarts for the microphone to start working, so I didn't realise I had a solution for a while.