Ok, I know now what's going on and how to fix it. It was not FS2Crew but speech recognition itself what was resetting my mic level to 100%. Obviously FS2Crew fires up Speech Recognition so that's why I saw this happening upon FS2Crew activation

 

I got this new headset a few days ago and simply needed calibrating. An embarrassing case of PBKAC but thought I might share in case it helps someone someday

One more update on my issue. Calibration won't set my mic level any lower than 30 no matter what.

Found a registry mod in a quick google search that will allow to set it to whatever you want:

 

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Speech\RecoProfiles\Tokens\{95CF724E-B3B5-4D94-A4FB-36AE77A88FE0}\{DAC9F469-0C67-4643-9258-87EC128C5941}\Volume

 

Token id may differ

 

I set that to 1000 - decimal (that's level 10) and seems to work for me.

 

source

Thanks for sharing that!
 

Cheers,

No prob Bryan.

 

Anyway, the moral of the story is don't be a cheap bum like me and get some decent headset. Amazing this €7 piece of junk works at all now with the mic level set to 10 haha. I put it in monitor so I can hear what goes through the mic and it's so aweful that I can hardly believe speech recognition & FS2Crew are able to pick up anything meaningful at all XD