I had the same thing happen with Ubuntu 14.04, After running pavucontrol, I realized I had setup for 5.1 sourround, I switched back to 2 Channel Stereo, and the issue vanished.
This may not be your issue, but hopefully it may help somebody sometime.
Thanks for the great posts, this page helped me work out a solution.
Playback of imported/recorded files distorted and fast.
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Audacity 1.2.x and 1.3.x are obsolete and no longer supported. If you still have those versions, please upgrade (see https://www.audacityteam.org/download/).
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Re: Playback of imported/recorded files distorted and fast.
I had this problem in my manjaro distro too. seems specific to the distro. Ill submit something downstream there. different things tried and now it works. First was to change the driver in settings...I thought I changed from default or pulseaudio to alsa, but now I don't see an alsa setting...anyway try fiddling there. Then I installed all the pulseaudio applets and widgets and ran the env variable suggested above. Now it plays back properly, including after rebooting.