Steelseries Sonar not working

ZoidGG · January 17

I was just using the Valorant preset on sonar for my nova pro headset and I have been using sonar for about a month now with no issues. As I was just in a comp game I noticed my monitor being weird so I went into my settings and changed my refresh rate. Once I did that however all the sound coming through sonar just stopped. I know valorant has audio issues like that sometimes so I restarted my game to try and fix it but that didn't work. Also to add my discord audio was still working during this only valorant having no audio. I then restarted sonar and my pc as a whole and still nothing working with it. has anyone else experienced issues like this with sonar? or know of a solution to this problem.

Hullwood2 · January 17

I've had my fair share of struggles with Sonar

1. Check Valorant and make sure it's outputting to Sonar

2. Make sure that in Sonar your playback is selected to the correct device

QuantumRand · January 17

I haven't messed with Steelseries in the last ~year, so I don't know if this situation has improved, but I ditched them because their software doesn't work right with Windows 11.

I "upgraded" to the Arctis 7+ a while back (from a well-used, and falling apart Arctis 7). At first, everything was great, had a nice gaming session, and then turned off my computer for a week. The next weekend, I go to start a gaming session, and I have no audio at all. I spent a year troubleshooting back and forth with Steelseries support. The best solution involved "tricking" Windows to use the correct audio device by going into the two System Settings menus (the updated one, and the old one) which don't sync right, and then manually un-syncing and then re-syncing the settings. And then not making any changes ever in Steelseries' software (which meant no Sonar).

What I found out later was that Windows Updates would automatically install Steelseries' dumb software, and that's when everything would start having issues. I prefer Dolby Atmos for Headphones, which is why I didn't install the software in the first place.

Annoyingly, uninstalling their software doesn't fix the issue. There's probably some driver file and/or registry that can be changed to fix things, but the only thing I was able to do to fix it was a fresh install of Windows, and then blocking Windows Updates from installing Steelseries software before ever plugging in the headset. Even then, it sucked not getting half of the advertised features of the headset, and, honestly in my opinion, they don't sound as good as the older models. So I'm done with Steelseries for now.