One thought that occurs straight away is that your microphone is "end address" rather than side address. Mounting it vertically like that will put you voice into the area where pick up is less (but you'll get some great reflections off your ceiling!)
You'll need to re-think your aiming--you want the XLR end pointed at noise sources like the mouse and keyboard--the the ball at the opposite end pointed directly at your mouth.
Ah the problem was that some of the documentation says front, but all the pictures in there show top, i've now fixed that.
Having a few issues now that i've set the system up. I'll make sure i'll explain how I have it all set up just incase i've done it all wrong: the XLR cable is firmly plugged into the mic and then firmly into the back of the Lexicon Alpha. The USB cable from the Alpha is going into a USB slot on the PC and my headphones are plugged into the port on the front with the symbol for headphones above them Line 1/Instument Dial is completely to the left (off) Line 2/Mic is completely to the right (on). the Monitor Button doesn't seem to do anything when its on mono or stereo (for all my problem i've done a test run with it pushed in or not pushed in) The monitor mix Dial is completely to the right (else no outgoing/game/music sound comes out) and the output level dial is almost completely to the right
Now on with the problems.
1. Mic volume is low, can't seem to get it to go any higher in windows or by physically doing anything to the lexicon or Mic. All I see to be able to do is to add DB at the end to anything I've recorded which is really what I hope the solution isnt.
2. If I record a bit of talking, (Adobe Audition
or Windows Sound Recorder) and save it to a file, then open the file in something that isnt going to edit the file in any way like Windows Media Player or VLC the sound I hear of me speaking is entirely in the right cup of the headphones, I.E. if I take the right cup of my headphones off of my ear I hear nothing.
Its kinda creepy just being on the right side of a recording and I can't imagine this is intentional, when you listen to a song sure they make use of singing in just the left or right or swapping around but generally the singer heard in the center which is what I really want, Googleing 'Lexicon Alpha Mono' seems to get a lot of hits of people complaining about this "only records on the right" thing. When reading the monitor assign buttons use in the instruction Manuel it says about instrument recordings on the left and mics on the right but that's just in the case of monitoring and i'm not really using the monitoring per se I'm listening to a recorded file and it states on that section "when the monitor switch is in mono it does not change the signals going to the computer in any way ---- they will still be separate and stereo in the computer" so it can't be that.
For a comparison I listened to both music and then a recording of me saying something on my old headset mic from when it was plugged into the mic socket and..... sound from both the left and right with music and sound from both the left and right with my voice.
EDIT: FRAPS the game (and other things) recording software actually records me center or stereo or whatever you want to call it when it's heard in both ears (yay!) but sometimes when I create a feature video I don't use what I recorded with FRAPS, I use Adobe Audition.
So there isn't anything wrong with the hardware (and even the volume was at a good level on FRAPS) I just need to know how to get my voice recording software to record center somehow...hmmm...
EDIT2: Tried setting Adobe Audition to record a track in Mono and it seems to record nothing when I record, which means its recording the 'Left' Side and there is no way to record 'Right' side in mono that I can see.
EDIT3: Flipped these two options around (picture is of the 'fixed' version) and now its fine one loud centered recording that you can hear in both ears. Not too bothered about windows sound recorder working, it was just an example to show that I wasn't being inept!