Unexplained distortion while recording

[Trebor]

It’s a reverb “audio enhancement” either from Windows
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/topic/disable-audio-enhancements-0ec686c4-8d79-4588-b7e7-9287dd296f72

or the computer manufacturer …

Audacity as reverb detector

Just setting up Audacity on a new computer. I was sure all the sound from my new computer had a reverb effect applied, (despite all the audio enhancements being turned off). So I generated a mono bleep in Audacity, and recorded it in stereo, (via stereo-mix). Low & behold, reverb … [recorded bleep has stereo reverb.png] (apart from latency, the red waveforms should be identical to the green original). Now the bad news: this reverb effect is baked-in, ̶a̶ ̶d̶i̶f̶f̶e̶r̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶a̶u̶d̶i̶o̶-̶…