Hi, I've finally given up getting my Dell Inspiron's built-in hda-intel soundcard to fully work. The mic input dies after suspend/resume. Heaven knows why. I'm using the latest alsa (14rc2), and this problem was noted as being fixed in the Alsa 13 changelog. Alsactl indicates that the soundcard's state is the same on resume as it is on suspend. So, basically, I'm stuck on this problem, and I'm on to famous Plan B: acquire an inexpensive USB adapter from Hong Kong!
The alsa website indicates that any usb adapter which is "standards compliant" will work with ALSA. Nevertheless, I'd like to hear of somebody else's success story before I plunk down $10 on a new piece of hardware. I'm think I'm basically looking for something like this.
Or this.
Or anything else if somebody has a better recommendation. I just need my mic to work.
If anyone has had any experience selecting a usb sound device that has worked out of the box, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could post and tell me.
Thanks!

-Jake

The only similar experience I have had was with USB headsets. I believe that the external USB sound cards are essentially the same as the headsets in that they both just use the "snd-usb-audio" ALSA module.

The headsets I have used never gave me any problems. They show up as another ALSA device, with their own mixer with controls for speaker and microphone levels. I assume you would have the same results with one of the devices you have linked to, but I can't personally say I have ever done it myself.