Steelseries arctis 5 produces a pop or crackling effect when exposed to busy or loud audio.
Steelseries arctis 5 produces a pop or crackling effect when exposed to busy or loud audio.
Bad audio in World of Warcraft 2022.12.23. Issues with crackling and popping sound during gameplay or when switching videos. Using a new steelseries headset and updated drivers, but the problem persists. PC and headset are only a few months old. No clear cause yet.
It appears the recording captures the problem during playback, not the headset directly. This suggests a driver-related issue rather than a hardware fault. Different USB ports shouldn't affect it. Likely the solution involves reinstalling the drivers. There might be an EQ setting on the device that's boosting gain and causing clipping with louder audio.
Manage the device settings. It might be better to remove the device completely and try uninstalling GG too. Doing both could work.
I removed GG and checked the device manager. Clicked on audio and mic, then uninstalled the steelseries version. Restarted and the game launched without it. After reinstalling GG, I confirmed the same settings were applied. It seems the problem was a driver issue. I plan to test it tomorrow to see if it resolves. So far everything is working well. Thanks for the suggestion!
This problem has repeated on the same set of headphones several times. Removing drivers and the GG app, then restarting helps temporarily. The issue comes back eventually, affecting other systems. My desktop stopped working with it last night. In my irritation, I switched to using the laptop with the headphones, but it also started acting up there... I’ve owned these headphones for years, and this only became an issue recently. I attribute it to Microsoft.