WASAPI Recording Sounds Incorrect

Hello all.
I’ve had trouble getting my recordings to sound the way they should. I’m dealing with Windows 8.1 and Audacity 2.4.2.
I’ve set the audio host to the titular Windows WASAPI, and the speakers (Realtek HD Audio) serve as the playback and recording devices (recording with 2 channels).

I’ve dabbled with WASAPI recording for about two years now and I had it working perfectly previously.
Recently I had to restore my computer’s factory settings, so naturally I’ve had to re-download Audacity again.
Of course I didn’t expect it to work right out of the box, but I can’t seem to get it working correctly now by my own.

When I try to record audio, the recording seems to have too much bass in it.
Said bass is not present in the source audio I’m recording from when I listen to it normally, only the recording suffers from it.
It’s not an issue with the software I’m playing the audio on; I’ve tried recording from Firefox, Opera and VLC Media Player, all with the same results.

Software playthrough is off, so it’s not that either. I’ve looked at some older topics about WASAPI, and they mentioned that the operating system might have audio enhancements enabled that might mess with the recording, so naturally I suspected that this would be the case for me too.

I first looked in the Sound section in the controller panel. I looked at the properties of my speakers, but no enhancements were active.
Then I opened the Realtek HD Audio Manager, but once again all of the possible enhancements were already turned off.

The third and final factor I have is something called ROG AudioWizard which is always installed by default on my computer.
I remember the AudioWizard having a very bass’y setting on by default when I first got my computer, but I disabled it right away.
Now after resetting factory settings, the AudioWizard doesn’t even seem to work, so I doubt it’s the source of my issue either.
It just claims my system is “configured to 0 audio channels” (which it isn’t) and refuses to let me use it. I even deleted it for a while just in case, but nothing changed.

I don’t know what else I could do.

How are you detecting the increase in bass?
If it’s just from listening, how, precisely, are you listening to the recording and how are you comparing it to the original?

Was that on the same computer?

I can pretty much listen to the source audio while I record, which still sounds normal / the way things usually sound on my computer.
Once I start listening to what Audacity has recorded, the recording sounds a bit more muffled like it’s had bass added to it.

Yes indeed it was. The only noticeable difference to me is the Audacity version.
I don’t recall which version it was back then, nor does it matter since I most likely can’t even get it again.

How exactly are you doing that? Headphones plugged into the headphone socket of the laptop that you are recording onto?


How exactly are you doing that? Headphones plugged into the headphone socket of the same laptop?

Oh right, yes. I’ve got headphones plugged in to my laptop.

What is the track sample rate in Audacity? (look in the panel on the left end of the track for something like “44100Hz”)

What is the “Project Rate”? (lower left corner of the main Audacity window)

Both are 44100 Hz.

Very peculiar.
The only thing I can think of is that there’s an “enhancement” setting somewhere that is changing the playback sound of some apps and not others.

I did some digging based on what you said here, and I was actually able to fix the issue.
Turns out the culprit was indeed the ROG AudioWizard thing. It was affecting things even though it didn’t let me access it.
I had to revert one of my audio drivers back to its earliest version to be able to use the AudioWizard and I was able to turn it off.
Thanks for the help anyways, I probably wouldn’t have looked into it further if it wasn’t for this guess!

Hi Dr. Dumb,
I have seemingly exactly the same issue with my audacity. It was working fine until it wasn’t. Do you remember what exactly you did with the ROG wizard to fix the issue?