Original sound is great, then WAV

Hi.
My original recording from my Android (m4a) sounds very good. Sounds very good on VLC. Then I finally figured out how to convert to WAV in VLC and dropped in onto Audacity…and now it sounds terrible.
Can I skip the VLC step?
Thank you vary much.

I’m much more excited about why it’s broken. Straight translation between formats doesn’t do that.

But to specifically answer you, If you install FFMpeg plugin, Audacity will open an M4A directly.

Scroll down.

https://www.audacityteam.org/download/windows/

I bet it’s still broken.

Can you make a 10 second sound test on the Android and post it here? Scroll down on a forum text window, Upload attachment. Did you plug microphones into the phone, or are you using the phone’s internal sound?

Koz