If all of a sudden your SteelSeries Arctis 5 headphones are not balanced anymore, for example if the sound comes out louder from one ear than the other, here’s the fix.

This issue only happens on Windows (figures) therefore the instruction to fix it is also for Windows.

  1. Control panel
  2. Sound
  3. Playback > Arctis 5 Game
  4. Properties
  5. Levels
  6. Balance
  7. Set the off-balanced side to 100 again

What a great driver. Why does it randomly set the balancing of one side lower? No wonder reverse-engineering this for Linux hasn’t proved to be an easy task [1, 2], considering how broken it is on Windows already.

Credit goes to AlvardReynolds on Reddit.
This comment is unfortunately buried under a lot of other non-working solutions and threads, so I posted it here as well. Mainly for myself so I can find how to navigate the Windows control panel more easily again.