Audio volume suddenly dropped by half

This issue started popping up for me just yesterday.

I'll be listening to music for a few hours when, out of nowhere, the volume just drops by about half.
A quick restart fixes it temporarily, but then the whole thing repeats itself later on.

I'm running an Asus Sound Blaster that I picked up on Craigslist about three months ago, and everything has been working perfectly until now.

Look, just dive into your settings and switch that audio over to 24-bit...
The thing is, in the Advanced Settings, it's usually set to VOIP by default, which is honestly kind of a joke, so you'll want to flip that over to either music or gaming mode instead.