Recording too loudly

Why is Audition recording room atmosphere and voiceover too loudly? Wavelengths of quiet room atmosphere (white noise) are HUGE and voiceover volume is recording so high it is off the charts and so loud it sounds like speakers turned up full blast. My settings in both software and hardware have not changed since my last recording session about a week ago when everything acted normally. There appears to be no solution for this. Does anyone have an idea of what could be going wrong?