Audio test

What this audio test does

This is a sound test for the whole chain between a file and your ears: the browser, the output device your computer picked, the cable, the driver in the speaker, and the room you are sitting in. It plays tones your browser generates on the spot, so there is nothing to download and nothing to wait for. Press start, answer five short questions, and you get a plain reading of what is working and what is not.

The five steps run in the order that isolates faults fastest. Left first, then right, because a single silent channel is by far the most common complaint and two tones settle it. Then a stereo pass, which catches the subtler problem of channels that both work but are wired the wrong way round. Then a bass sweep and a top-end sweep, which tell you the range your hardware actually covers rather than the range printed on the box.

How to run the test properly

Set your volume to about a third before you start. Generated tones carry far more energy at a single frequency than music does at the same apparent loudness, and a full-volume 60 Hz tone into a small speaker is unpleasant and occasionally damaging. You can always turn it up.

Take your headphones off the desk and put them on the right way round — the left cup is almost always marked, usually inside the headband. If you are testing speakers, sit roughly between them. If you are on Bluetooth, allow a moment of delay on every step; a 200 ms gap between pressing play and hearing something is the wireless link, not a fault.

Close anything else making sound, especially a video in another tab. An equaliser, a virtual-surround app or a "spatial audio" setting will change what you hear on the stereo step, so switch those off for the duration if you want a clean answer about the hardware.

Reading the result

Both channels play. Your output works. If music still sounds wrong, the problem is upstream — a file, an app mixer, or a processing setting.

One channel is silent. Work from the cheapest fix outwards. Check the balance control in the system sound settings, which gets knocked sideways more often than people expect. Reseat the plug, fully — a jack that is one click short commonly plays only one side. Flex the cable near the connector while a tone plays; crackling means a broken conductor. Finally, try the same headphones on a phone. If they work there, the fault is the computer or its port.

Neither channel plays. Nine times in ten this is the output device rather than the hardware. Plugging headphones in does not always switch the output on Windows, a monitor connected over HDMI often steals the default device, and a browser tab can be muted independently of the system volume.

The channels are swapped. On speakers this is a cable, not a setting. On headphones, check the orientation first, then any audio app that offers channel swapping or a reversed stereo mode.

The bass sweep gave you nothing until quite high. That is typical and not a fault. Laptop speakers routinely produce nothing below about 150 Hz, phone speakers nothing below about 400 Hz. Only a reasonably sized speaker or a subwoofer reaches the bottom of the range.

What the frequency bands mean

Twenty hertz to twenty kilohertz is the conventional span of human hearing, and it splits into bands that behave very differently. Sub-bass, below about 60 Hz, is felt more than heard and needs a big driver. Bass to around 250 Hz carries the kick drum and the bass line. The mids, from roughly 500 Hz to 2 kHz, hold most of a human voice — every speaker ever made reproduces this band, which is why a broken speaker usually still passes speech. The upper mids around 3 kHz are where the ear is most sensitive, so faults there are the most obvious. Above 6 kHz you are in cymbals and air, and above about 12 kHz most people's hearing and most cheap drivers both start to give up.

Why a browser test and not an app

Anything that plays a fixed audio file is testing the file as much as the hardware. The Web Audio API generates each tone mathematically at the moment you press play, at your device's own sample rate, so what reaches the speaker is a clean signal at exactly the frequency shown on the readout. It also means nothing is recorded and nothing is uploaded: the page never asks for microphone access, because it does not need to listen to anything — you are the measuring instrument.

The waveform on screen is drawn from the signal being played, not an animation. A flat line means silence, and a visible wave means the browser is producing output. That is worth knowing on its own: if the trace moves and you hear nothing, the browser is fine and the fault is after it, in the output device or the hardware.

When to use the other tools

The tone generator holds any single frequency between 1 Hz and 22 kHz so you can hunt a rattle, tune an instrument or check a filter. The speaker test and the headphone test run the checks specific to each kind of hardware. The bass test finds the point where your low end starts, and the hearing range test finds the point near the top where yours stops. All of them are free, and none of them need an account.