Although this question is not strictly Rockbox-related, but I think the answer may be beneficial to many of our recording amateurs inspired by the extreme nicety of Rockbox.
I bought a new Sony ECM-817 microphone. Unfortunately, I dropped it hard from a height of about 1.5m before I ever had a chance to experimenting it with my iriver H140 and Rockbox. Now I don't know whether the mic is dead or not. The problem is the signal recorded is extremely low when compared to those using the iriver-bundled external microphone or build-in microphone (under the same gain setting). In general I must set the gain to the maximum extreme of 48db to have a weak signal.
And I understood later there is a precaution in the Sony manual that says "never be dropped or subjected to extreme shock since it is very sensitive." So, is the mic dead?