A perfectly working microphone sounds really low and with a lot of noise on a clean win 7 64 bit install using the latest drivers provided by Asus for the Maximus VI Hero (Realtek_Audio_Win7-8_8-1_VER6017023)

Nothing has been overlooked (volume levels, boosts, noise canceling...)

No known software settings alter this behavior (many tricks out there, none work).

Uninstalling drivers and using windows generic does not solve the issue.

Drivers seem bugged as they don't overwrite some windows settings (view youtube link below)

You can find many posts online where people seem to be confusing the error with the typical problems of a muted mic, boost not enabled, etc... and end up concluding that the problem is in the mic itself. Well, it's not. My mic works fine on my laptop and on my wife's desktop.

All this fuzz about such a great Audio device on-board and the drivers are the messiest thing I've seen in years, hard to believe this is actually shipped like this. Also something tells me devs themselves have issues as I noticed in this video: youtube.com/watch?v=mLc_hGbqOt4

So what's the deal here? Disable in bios and install old Sound Blaster?