adjusting the recording volume makes my mic record louder in one ear

I just got a new computer (Skytech Archangel 3.0, if it’s relevant), and so I’ve been doing a lot of debugging of my streaming setup, but this bug is really stumping me.

Essentially, whenever I adjust the recording volume of my microphone (Blue Yeti, USB) through Audacity, it splits the audio feed so its very loud in one ear and very quiet in the other. Sometimes I can adjust the volume again and make it fix itself, but if it’s not louder in one ear, it’s much too quiet in both. I’m using the same mic gain and roughly the same recording volume in Audacity itself as I did with my old computer (Lenovo Legion), but the waveform is so much smaller than it used to be.

I’ve attached a screenshot of some audio I’ve recorded that showcases this issue - the first section of audio was recorded without the uneven ear glitch and the waveform looks tiny, and the second section was recorded after wiggling the recording volume around but landing it back in pretty much the same spot, and as you can see, one ear is way louder than the other.

Recording in mono does pretty much fix the uneven ear glitch and even the volume issue in Audacity itself, but I’ve noticed that somehow Audacity seems to be affecting my other programs as well; when I run OBS, it doesn’t have this problem, but if I start up Audacity while it’s running, suddenly OBS’ volume is messed up in the same way, and it doesn’t fix itself until I restart my computer, even if I switch Audacity to mono.

My OS is Windows 10. My Audacity version is 3.1.0 (I just installed it on my computer, and re-installed it after I noticed this glitch). It is possible there are some issues coming from the fact that I had tried to use a spare hard drive to transfer some programs from my old laptop to my new pc, including my previous version of Audacity, and I came to realize that I had no idea where every folder for each application was located, so I had essentially installed/downloaded only partial versions of these programs. I would think re-installing should have fixed any errors stemming from that, though.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! My audio quality has been struggling, T^T
Error Screenshot.png

Does this also happen if you use a different sound device (that is to say, WASAPI instead of MME)?

If you want to record in stereo (different sounds to the left & right) nake sure [u]Windows is set for stereo[/u] and the Yeti should also be set for stereo. Stereo microphones are somewhat rare but the Yeti has stereo and 3 other (mono) patterns/modes.

I tried WASAPI, and it seems like I do still have to really fiddle with the volume if I want things to be even, but the good news is it’s not too quiet when it is balanced! The bad news is I seem to have truly no control over the volume - I turned it down, and it went up.

It seems like my Windows is set for stereo based on that article, and I’ve had the yeti on the same setting for years and it’s never been a problem until now. For most of my recording, I honestly don’t care that much about different sounds in the left and right, it’s just that switching to mono doesn’t solve the problem of Audacity messing with the stereo audio in my other programs. It’s possible that if I turn those all to mono, too, it’ll be fixed? I’ll try and look into that, but it would be nice to at least have the option to record in stereo if I wanted to.