Configuring USB digital microphone under Linux

Question

I just bought a digital USB microphone. It looks nice, but I cannot make it work. I use openSuse 12.3.

How do I ever know whether my system has the drivers for such and such microphone?

The good news it shows in alsamixer as a USB microphone. It is set as capture device with full volume, it's listed in arecord --list-devices but still I cannot start recording with arecord hw:N,M; I get a mute file test.wav.

From what I understood, the first step should be to disable all third party sound servers (like Pulse-Audio, Xine, Phonon etc.) and try the ALSA way.

tom@oberon:~> lsusb 
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 046d:c044 Logitech, Inc.
LX3 Optical Mouse Bus 003 Device 003: ID 062a:0201 Creative Labs
Defender Office Keyboard (K7310) S Zodiak KM-9010 Bus 010 Device 002:
ID 0d8c:0005 C-Media Electronics, Inc.

The arecord --list-devices gives line:

 card 1: MICROPHONE [USB MICROPHONE], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]  
 Subdevices: 1/1   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

I tried recording with audacity, but it does not work to any extent.

dmesg command output:

[ 4270.201048] usb 10-1: new full-speed USB device number 3 using xhci_hcd
[ 4270.247392] usb 10-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0d8c, idProduct=0005
[ 4270.247399] usb 10-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 4270.247404] usb 10-1: Product: USB MICROPHONE
[ 4270.247408] usb 10-1: Manufacturer: MICE MICROPHONE
[ 4270.247411] usb 10-1: SerialNumber: 201308
[ 4270.261462] input: MICE MICROPHONE USB MICROPHONE as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.0/0000:04:00.0/usb10/10-1/10-1:1.2/input/input56
[ 4270.261677] hid-generic 0003:0D8C:0005.0004: input,hidraw3: USB HID v1.11 Device [MICE MICROPHONE USB MICROPHONE] on usb-0000:04:00.0-1/input2
[ 4270.298216] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: ERROR: unexpected command completion code 0x11.
[ 4270.298227] usb 10-1: Not enough bandwidth for altsetting 1
[ 4270.306239] ALSA mixer.c:889 10:0: cannot get min/max values for control 2 (id 10)
[ 4270.306390] usbcore: registered new interface driver snd-usb-audio

What does it mean :

[ 4270.298216] xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: ERROR: unexpected command completion code 0x11. [ 4270.298227] usb 10-1: Not enough bandwidth for altsetting 1 ???