Getting the sound working with a USB headset microphone is very annoying on Linux. The volume is very low no matter what you do and installing pipewire does not help either. Linux does need one simple way to get sound working and it should just work the first time. I tried the headset microphone on a Macbook and it worked perfectly. So why does it not work on Linux as well as it does on Windows? On Mac OSX it worked perfectly and the online microphone test worked a treat. There should be only one sound framework in Linux and it should always work just fine every time. On Windows, it is a piece of cake to get a USB headset working easily. Linux should be the same, and it should be all GUI-driven, you should never need to use the command line at all. Just use the GUI to set sound levels and you are set to use Discord or whatever else you do online that needs a microphone. This is as simple as it gets. If the year of the Linux desktop is supposedly coming, it needs to work better with all the hardware you are using. Instead of needing Alsa and Pulseaudio, it should just be one system that is integrated into Linux.
Is that so hard to think about and implement? Any USB headset with a microphone should be easily working out of the box on Linux, with no faffing about with command lines and other junk. But we get Systemd instead. If it had one consistent usable desktop environment and consistent sound support for gaming, this would be much better. But no. This may be holding Linux back, most gamers just use Windows as the microphone volume always works just fine. This may be possible on Linux I am not sure. What if you just removed Pulseaudio completely and just used Alsa instead? Would that work better than having both installed? Why do you need this? This is very frustrating indeed. If Mac OSX works better than Linux, then it is a sad state. So this does need to be fixed quickly. This would be a very good thing indeed to have integrated into Linux. Better sound support, replacing Alsa and Pulselaudio and just having one sound system that just works and supports all USB devices such as headsets and Bluetooth devices perfectly with good sound volume.
That would be a winner in my book.