Some Games Reset Spatial Audio (To Sonic or Off)

[Devilish Dave]

Anyone know why some games, Dying Light 2 as well, reset my spatial audio?

Apex Legends used to do this, but after an update it no longer does it. However, Dying Light 2, Terriaria, A Plague Tale, to name a few, all reset my spatial audio settings.

I have been dealing with this for 2 years now and I have tweaked a lot of things to try and fix it. I have also written to some developers, made threads on various forums and nobody is able to pinpoint the reason.

I'm also not the only one with this problem, so there's that too.
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The problem in detail is this:

After the PC is turned on, running either of the games mentioned above (and probably some others) the spatial audio which you have set, is reverted to "Off" or in some cases to "Sonic". This only happens the fist time such a game ran and when you change it back to your preferred settings, running another such game no longer changes it anymore, until you restart your computer. So whatever causes this setting to change, only works once during that session of your PC being turned on.

I have given and removed applications from prioritizing my output device, as this was thought to be the reason why this happens. Nevertheless, this does not change anything. I have used various outputs with spatial audio and that didn't matter either, the same games would revert the preferred settings. I have scanned for corrupted windows files too and this is also an issue on a newer laptop. So that in itself kind of ruled out a setting that I have, since that laptop doesn't yet have anything installed apart from Terraria for testing this very issue as I wanted to exclude the idea that some program of mine is causing this.

Which leads me to believe, that the game's first launch does something and that these games in general have something to do with maybe the audio driver? One thing I have not been able to rule out, is if it is somehow related to Nvidia, nevertheless, I don't have Nvidia's Audio driver installed, but both the laptop and PC have an Nvidia GPU. I confidently doubt this is related however. Nevertheless, it is pretty annoying, especially because it is only certain games that do this and not all of them.