Instant saturation when recording

Using Audacity 2.2.1 on Windows 10

This started happening after doing dozens of recording w/o this issue: I’ll record from a turntable and the sound will suddenly go to instant saturation and stay there until I stop the recording. If I start over again, it will usually record nominally. It is doing this on 2.2.1, but it started doing it on an older version, something like 2.1.6 I think. Previously on this same version, it had never occurred. So I am thinking maybe it is Window related, but I have no clue where to even look to try to diagnose.
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How is the turntable connected to the computer?
What’s the make / model of turntable?

Were you doing anything other than recording on the computer when this occurred?

Obviously the “saturated” sound will sound really bad, but can you still hear the music that you were recording (like it was turned up way too loud, or is it just noise and no music?

The turntable is an Ion USB turntable connected via USB.

The only thing I am doing other than using Audacity is surfing the web on Google Chrome.

The thing that makes it tough to diagnose is that I am not doing anything different from before. Previously, I recorded roughly 40 albums via the same turntable on the same computer w/o issue. The only difference I can think of is that I used to use Firefox as a web browser, but switched to Chrome.

I haven’t saved any of the “instant saturation” sections, so I can’t say how they actually sound, but next time it happens, I’ll give it a listen.

If it’s just random noise, my guess is a hardware problem with the turntable.

If it sounds like super-loud/distorted music, there’s a slight chance it’s [u]Windows “Enhancements”[/u].

I don’t think it’s a driver problem because virtually all of these USB audio devices use the Microsoft-supplied drivers that everybody else uses.

The only thing I am doing other than using Audacity is surfing the web on Google Chrome

It’s not a good idea to multitask while recording because you can get buffer overflow and “glitches” in the audio, but I doubt it’s related to your problem. (Windows is always multi-tasking, even if you’re only running one application, but you do want to minimize it.)

I think I solved my problem. I was using “Microphone (USB Audio Codec)” as the recording device. I switched to “Primary Sound Capture Driver”. Since the switch, I have recorded about 6-7 albums w/o the issue showing up. The sound is better as well.