Speaker and headphone test

🔊 Test tone generator

The sound is synthesised right in the browser: frequency, channel and volume change on the fly, and there is nothing to download

Start quiet: a long tone at 20 to 40 Hz at high volume can kill the small speaker of a laptop or a phone

🧠 What a sound test shows

The low end is checked with tones from 20 to 100 Hz: if 20 Hz is silent but 40 Hz comes through, the speaker simply has no bass that deep, which is normal for a laptop or a phone. Rattling and crackling on the bass means the driver is going into overload or something in the cabinet is resonating.

A sweep runs through the whole range in one go, so dips and rattles show up as a change in loudness or a stray noise at particular points. The left and right channel test catches swapped wires and a dead channel: the tone must come from exactly the side it is named after.

Phase is checked with a pair of identical signals where the second one is inverted. With correct wiring the first half sounds tight and centred, while the second smears and loses its bass. If there is no difference at all, most likely only one speaker is playing. Pink noise sounds even across the whole range, which makes it handy for matching the loudness of speakers against each other.

The scale shows where each tone from the list above lands. Hearing works logarithmically, so the distance from 20 to 40 Hz on it is the same as from 10 to 20 kHz: that is one octave.

When you need this: accepting new speakers or headphones, tracking down a buzz, checking how a home cinema is wired after a move, setting up a subwoofer, verifying the channels on a mixer or a car stereo, testing a sound card or an adapter after a cable swap.