I am recording my 7th audiobook and the microphone volume suddenly went way up causing distortion.

Question

I was 16 chapters into my audiobook when my Rode 3 NT-USB mic got splashed with some water. I used a blow dryer on it just in case, but when went to record the volume of my voice was so loud it was distorting the recording. It was also picking up way more ambient room noise than normal. I was able to finish the book using the "loudness" settings for ACX, but I really wasn't happy with how the last chapters sounded. I decided to order a new mic thinking mine was damaged, however, I just hooked it all up and it does the exact same thing. Ruling out the mic as the cause, I now have to think there is a setting that I accidentally changed on Adobe Audition CC 2018. Normally I get a -12 to -6 db level with my voice and now I am getting the redline pegged out past 0 db with just a normal conversational voice level. 
 
Any thoughts or ideas would be much appreciated!
 
Cheers,
 
Tim

SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Answer

Audition only records what it's sent by whatever sound device you are using - it can't affect the input in any way at all. So whatever's caused this, it isn't Audition, I'm afraid. But because it's a USB device, it's almost certainly using the Windows mixer app to set the recording level. What you almost certainly need to do is go to the settings panel and look for the Sound option - that should give you a path to where you can set the record level.

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