since i got my work laptop last year it's been doing weird shit with audio that i could never figure out, adding reverb and weird boosting that made so many things sound awful, obviously some post-processing coming from somewhere but there was nothing enabled in either windows audio settings nor the realtek drivers

anyway today i found there's a THIRD thing called "Waves MaxxAudio" installed and THAT was the culprit. I turned it off and now everything sounds normal. Fucks sake