external mic not recognized on Acer Aspire E 15 (E5-573-55U8)

["Kevin Bloch (né Field)" <kevinjamesfield@gmail.com>]

Hi wonderful ALSA devs,

Wondering if you could help me out.  I inherited this laptop and put 
Linux Mint 18.1 on it, and would really appreciate it if there were some 
way to eventually get an external mic working on it, because the 
internal one is naturally pretty noisy, which makes it hard to use this 
machine for professional meetings.

Hopefully it's not against list policy to simply link elsewhere: the 
details are all available at 
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/355552/external-headset-mic-not-listed-in-linux-mint-18-1-64-bit-on-acer-aspire-e-15 
.  I tried getting into patching the drivers myself, but I didn't make 
it too far.

BTW I would just report a bug with the bug tracker, but the Bug Tracker 
link in the sidebar of 
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page leads to 
https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug which gives a Not Found error 
page.

Anyway please let me know what I can do to help facilitate by getting 
further info from my machine here.

Thanks very much,
Kev