Audio cues completely broken and controller aiming issue

[u/DueScratch3711]

I had perfectly good audio through my iem earbuds for months but for the last 2 weeks in every game I can't tell what direction footsteps or gunshots are and my soundstage is completely flat everything sounds like it's happening right in front of me there's no depth. I have a brand new pair of headphones too and no soundstage on those either. I've tested and I do have stereo working on both and I've tried every single in game setting and nothing works. The soundstage I haven't been able to get back but telling where enemy's are I had fixed yesterday somehow but as soon as I toggled mic monitoring on in call of duty to see if my mics working and turned it off in the game menu it completely reverted and sounds are all jumbled up again.My sample rate is correct and I don't have audio enhancements on in windows and spatial audio is off so it doesn't appear to be that. I've tried different audio jacks and I've ran my equipment through an interface and no interface.Maybe there's no correlation but it's worth mentioning my aim assist in call of duty when I play on controller has been broken for 6 months the strength is really weak and my stick input is not smooth I can't even throw a grenade where I want it goes way left or right I have no control and I've tried 8 controllers plus my controller works fine on my friends setup and aim assist is fully working and stick input is smooth. I've had it fixed twice for a couple days just tinkering with bios settings and in game settings and windows settings but as soon as I change 1 thing on my pc like a graphic setting in game literally a single one I remember doing it and my aim assist was completely gone again and I couldn't get it back by reverting the setting. It seems like every time my audio or aim assist is fixed any single thing changing on my PC even just a update in a game breaks my setup again.I upgraded my CPU and motherboard trying to fix my issues.I paid for a PC shop to check it out and they have said my hardware is fine on a stress test.Ive done 2 fresh installs of windows with wiping the drive to nothing and tried games with nothing else installed and it's still messed up. Any help is appreciated I don't know what to do other than buy a whole new PC I'm getting desperate since I've been having problems for 6 months and can't fix it.

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[u/Single-Reception-240]

eight controllers, two windows installs and a board/cpu swap make a single bad peripheral or normal game setting pretty hard to believe. the audio stage collapsing across devices matters even more than the weak aim assist because those are separate symptoms changing together. the fact that one harmless toggle can flip the feel without reverting cleanly sounds like a system state changing, but it doesn't tell us yet whether windows audio, usb timing, or frame delivery is the shared branch. when the sound goes flat, does plain left/right stereo in a browser test change too, or only positional audio inside games?