This forum is for Audacity on Windows.If you were setting payback affects in Windows, then they would be applied to everything but only during playback.I just recorded 3 episodes for my podcast with a bunch of movie trailer effects I was trying out just for fun. I had NO IDEA they would be permanently set for all my future recordings!
Go back into Windows and turn them off. It's not a terrible idea with so many applications and services trying to "help you out," to listen on a clean playback system that has nothing to do with your computer just to see what you have.
Windows has effects, Skype has effects, Zoom has effects, Audacity has playback affects. Do you like games? Guess what? More effects.
It's not unusual for someone trying to record their voice clean to spend a good chunk of time turning off effects, changes and distortions. That leads to be recommendation that if you have enough trouble with this, stop recording on the computer.
I ran across another one a bit ago. My older MacBook Pro laptop is a beefy machine, but there are no speaker quality awards given. Then I found they got around that in later versions by applying effects and distortions. And you can adjust them.
Oh... Great....
There is another recommendation for live production. Export a protection WAV sound file after you read but before you start messing with the sound and other post production. You should never have to go all the way back to reading everything again.
Koz