About Audio Test Tool

This site started with an ordinary problem: a pair of headphones where one side had gone quiet, and no quick way to tell whether the fault was the headphones, the cable, the laptop or a balance slider somebody had nudged. The pages that came up in a search were either a video, a page built two decades ago, or an app download. None of them answered the question in thirty seconds, which is all the question deserved.

What it does

Every tool here generates its sound in your browser with the Web Audio API. There is no audio file to download, so a tone starts the moment you press play and is exactly the frequency shown on the readout rather than whatever a recording happens to contain. The waveform drawn on screen is taken from the signal actually being produced, which is why it stays flat when nothing is playing.

The site covers a full sound test, a tone generator, separate speaker and headphone tests, a bass test, a hearing range test and a DTMF keypad, plus written guides for the problems the tests turn up.

Privacy

Nothing you do here leaves your device. The page never requests microphone access, because it has no reason to listen to anything — you are the measuring instrument. Your answers to the test steps are held in the page while you use it and are gone when you close the tab. The only thing stored on your device is your volume setting and your light or dark theme preference, both in your browser's own storage.

What this site is not

The hearing pages are not a hearing test and cannot be. A clinical test measures each ear separately with calibrated equipment in a quiet booth, and finds the quietest sound you can detect at each frequency. This site plays an uncalibrated tone through unknown headphones in an unknown room. If you have a concern about your hearing, see an audiologist.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, or a test behaves oddly on hardware we have not seen, please say so: hello@audiotesttool.com. Include the browser and the device, since audio behaviour differs between them more than almost anything else on the web.