audio (especially voice chat) becomes “bottlenecked”

heey, I need help because for the past few days I’ve been having a very strange audio issue in Valorant when using AirPods Pro and a separate USB microphone.

Context:
I’ve been playing for months with this exact setup:

• AirPods Pro as the audio output
• USB microphone as the input

And it always worked perfectly with no loss of quality.

What’s happening now:

• In the lobby/menu everything sounds normal, clean, and high quality.
• But as soon as I enter a match, the audio automatically changes.
• The game and voice chat start sounding “muffled,” dull, low-quality, like it switches to an inferior audio mode.
• This only happens when the output is set to the AirPods.

Important details:

• If I change the voice chat output to any other speaker, the audio goes back to normal.
• On Discord and other games, everything works perfectly, so the problem is exclusive to Valorant.
• This has never happened before, and I’ve been using this exact setup for a long time.