I wrote here earlier about being unable to turn off my microphone. My headset had a removable mike. So in the end in order to fix it I just unplugged the mike.

I’m using an older pair of IEM’s I have, and the problem resurfaced. I did all the steps turned off microphone in the settings, even went through device manager to turn it off. Was still getting sound.

What finally worked was going into speakers, and sliding the “Rear Pink In” slider all the way down. It’s still not off, but at least i can’t hear myself breath anymore.

would anyone know why this is happening?

The motherboard is a Gigabyte Z790 UD AC