Speaker test

Four checks for desk, laptop and hi-fi speakers: left, right, stereo imaging and the bottom of the range.

Silent
Left Right

Turn your volume to about a third before you start. Tones are louder than music.

  1. Left channel

    A 440 Hz tone plays in the left speaker only. Sound from the right means the channels are swapped.

  2. Right channel

    The same tone, right side only. Nothing here after a working left usually means a dead driver, a loose plug or a balance slider pushed to one side.

  3. Stereo check

    Left, then right, then both together. The middle pass should sit in the centre of your head on headphones.

  4. Bass sweep

    A tone climbing from 20 Hz to 200 Hz. Stop it the moment you first hear it — that point is roughly where your speakers give up on low end.

Set up before you test

A speaker test is only as good as your listening position. Sit roughly between the pair with both speakers pointing at you, at about the same distance from each. If one is against a wall and the other is in open air, the one near the wall will sound louder and heavier in the bass, and you will blame the speaker for the room.

Turn off any "audio enhancement", virtual surround or spatial mode first. Those features deliberately alter the channel balance and the phase relationship between left and right, which is exactly what the first three steps are measuring. On Windows they hide under the device's Advanced or Spatial sound properties; on macOS they are usually in the app rather than the system.

What each step tells you

Left, then right. These two steps answer the common questions in one go: is a channel dead, and are the channels the right way round? Point at the speaker you can hear each time rather than deciding after the fact — it is surprisingly easy to talk yourself into hearing the side you expected.

Stereo. Left, right, then both together. When both play, a correctly set-up pair produces a sound that appears to come from a point between them rather than from either box. If the combined pass sounds thin, wide or hard to place, the speakers may be wired out of phase — one pair of terminals reversed.

Bass sweep. The tone climbs from 20 Hz to 200 Hz and you stop it when you first hear something. That point is a rough lower limit for the whole chain. Desk speakers commonly start between 60 and 100 Hz, laptop speakers between 150 and 250 Hz, and a decent floorstander or a subwoofer well below 40 Hz.

Typical low-frequency limits

SpeakerUseful output starts around
Phone speaker400–600 Hz
Laptop speakers150–250 Hz
Small desk or monitor speakers80–120 Hz
Bookshelf speakers50–70 Hz
Floorstanding speakers35–45 Hz
Subwoofer20–30 Hz

These are what people actually hear in a normal room, not the manufacturer's figures, which are usually quoted at a tolerance that includes output far too quiet to matter.

Fixing what the test finds

One speaker silent. Swap the two speaker cables at the amplifier. If the silence follows the cable, the cable or the amplifier channel is at fault; if it stays with the speaker, the speaker is. That single swap separates the two possibilities faster than any amount of settings-checking.

Both silent. Check the output device before anything else. A monitor connected over HDMI frequently becomes the default output and sends your sound to a screen with no speakers in it.

Thin, hollow bass with a vague centre. Suspect reversed polarity on one speaker. Swap the positive and negative wires at one speaker only and run the stereo step again.

Buzzing on certain notes. Almost always something resonating rather than a fault: a loose grille, a screw, a cabinet panel, or an object on the same shelf. Use the tone generator with a square wave to hunt it down, then find it by hand.

If you are testing headphones rather than speakers, the headphone test runs the checks that suit them, and the left/right test is the quick version when you only need to settle which side is working.

Frequently asked questions

How do I test my speakers?

Play a tone in the left speaker, then the right, then both, and finally sweep the bass to find where the low end starts. The test above does that in four steps and tells you what it found. Sit roughly between the speakers so you can judge which side a sound came from.

How do I know if my speakers are wired the wrong way round?

Run the left step and point at the speaker you heard. If it is the one on your right, the cables are swapped at the amplifier or at the speakers. Nothing else in a normal setup can reverse the channels, so it is a five-minute fix behind the desk.

What is speaker polarity and how do I check it?

Polarity is whether both speakers push out at the same moment. If one is wired with its positive and negative terminals reversed, the pair cancel each other in the bass and the stereo image collapses. Play a low tone through both: in phase it sounds centred and full, out of phase it sounds thin and hard to locate. Fix it by swapping the two wires at one speaker only.

Why do my laptop speakers produce no bass?

Because they are too small to move enough air. A driver a few centimetres across cannot produce useful output below roughly 150 Hz whatever the software claims, and phone speakers usually start higher still. The bass sweep will show you the real starting point for your hardware.

My speakers crackle. What does that mean?

Crackling that changes when you move the cable is a broken conductor or a dirty connector. Crackling that appears only at high volume is usually the amplifier clipping or the driver reaching its limit. Crackling on one specific frequency is often a loose object in the cabinet rather than the speaker itself.

How do I find a rattle?

Use the tone generator with a square wave and sweep slowly through the 60 to 200 Hz region, which is where most rattles live. Square waves are much more effective at finding them than sine waves because they excite a whole series of harmonics at once. When the buzz appears, press lightly on panels and grilles to find the one that stops it.

Should I test speakers at full volume?

No. Test at a moderate level, around a third. A sustained tone at full volume puts far more sustained power into a driver than music does, and it is one of the few ways a test signal can actually cause damage.

Do new speakers need breaking in?

A little. A driver suspension loosens slightly in the first hours of use, which can make a small measurable difference at the bottom of the range. It is not the transformation some retailers describe, and no amount of break-in fixes a fault you can hear on the first day.

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