Hey guys! I am using my ~6-months-old Dell, Windows 8 laptop, a couple-years-old Lexicon Alpha, and what I think is a fairly nice Electo-Voice microphone. I was doing some basic recording in Audacity, and it was working, except that the tracks recorded really quietly. When I tried to bring them up to normal volume, there was a large amount of background static.

Is this problem just a limitation of my equipment, or is there some setting I can change to fix it? I have Cubase (idk which version, but an old one) LE that I could try to download. Would that be likely to fix anything?

Thanks in advance!