Poor distorted sound quality

[skaler]

I have a Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card that feeds a Harman Kardon stereo receiver. The tape monitor output of this receiver feeds the line in on the sound card. Until recently, I used Magix Audio Cleaning lab software, and have, over the years, purchased 3 or 4 versions of it. Each purchase was forced by an upgrade in the Windows operating systems. When I bought a computer with Win 7 installed, I found yet again that my version of Magix was incompatible. So, I found Audacity. However, playing back what I recorded sounds tinny, distorted, and seems to have a short period reverb added.
I'm not a musician, but simply record either tunes from youtube or my own vinyl records. I then let iTunes convert the wav file to an mp3 or 4. With the Magix, the result was always satisfactory. I cannot get Audacity to give me an undistorted result.
Am I recording at too high a volume? Are there settings somewhere that I am missing?
I tried selecting line in,"what U hear", mike in-all yield the same result.

[steve]

Am I recording at too high a volume?

Possibly. Can you post a screenshot (there's a tool in the Audacity Help menu that will allow you to make a screenshot of a track)
or post a short (less than 1 MB) sample as a WAV file.

I tried selecting line in,"what U hear", mike in-all yield the same result.

"Line In" is probably the setting that you should use.