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I’ve had a terrible time with this tech. I don’t understand why in this day and age you can’t just plug in a headset and Mike. But basically every time I get thing set up on discord there’s something wrong and I have to mess around. A few times I’ve even discoed on my phone because it’s that bad.

Today we were trying to get a game on Stellaris with new expansion. Not had an online game in months, we’re all keen with the new expansion and on lockdown anyway so we won’t be seeing each other for a while. Put headset in top USB port. I can hear them, they can’t hear me. I go on discord and it tells me the mike is fine and was detecting sound. I then spend half an hour trawling the internet with useless pointers and advice on this problem and get nowhere before asking my Dad. We then put it another USB slot at the back of the machine and it magically starts working. I don’t quite know how the sound was fine but it wasn’t picking up the microphone. If there was no sound or power that would make more sense.

I don’t get what the issue is with it. There’s always something wrong with this tech. Is there some way of reliably getting it so O just have to plug the mike in and nothing else should change. It’s like the PC is changing my settings every time I try it. It’s years of issues with multiple PCs and multiple headsets and it really harms me getting into PC gaming properly because I hate dealing what should be a simple matter of plugging something in. I don’t see the point of a several grand PC and expensive headset that can’t do something that essential and basic. Why aren’t plug in and go microphones a thing? Why are you expected to witch doctor the thing to work?

I dunno, I have a fairly simple heaphone and mike that just has the green and pink speaker and mic hookup, there's a jack in my PC for it and I've never had any problems.

USB stuff in general feths with my computer more than anything else. I get these weird "rolling blackouts" where my USB drivers crash on certain ports on my PC and I have to move them around to get my mouse and keyboard functioning again. It's pretty obnoxious, I can't imagine choosing to move anything else to USB tbh.

See if there are some audio drivers you have to download related to your speakers. They may be out of date.

Control Panel -> Sound -> Playback tab + Recording tab. Make sure your headset is set as the default audio device in these locations.

As others have suggested, check drivers are up to date for your headset, and chipset / USB drivers for the PC too.

Beyond that, some headsets have onboard firmware that can be updated. Check the manufacturers website for anything like that.

Because Tzeentch thought it'd be funny.

Try updating your drivers. Or rolling back to the last settings that worked.