Speaker Tester

About Speaker Tester

Speaker Tester helps you diagnose laptop and desktop speakers without installing extra software. Choose between a calibration tone or a smooth frequency sweep to check for distortion, rattles, or dead channels. The tool runs entirely in your browser and supports mono or stereo monitoring.

1. Pick a test type: 440 Hz pure tone for alignment or a customizable frequency sweep.
2. Select left, right, or stereo channels and adjust the output volume slider.
3. Click Play to begin the test; update frequency or sweep settings to suit your speakers.
4. Use the recent playback log to track what you tested and repeat specific runs.

How do I test if my speakers or headphones are working?

Click Start, choose the Left/Right channel test, and listen for a short tone in only the left ear, then only the right. If both tones come out of the wrong channel you have a wiring or balance swap somewhere in the chain — check the OS balance slider first. If one tone is silent, that driver, wire, or connector has failed; reseat the cable, try a different jack, and retest. Next run the frequency sweep from 20 Hz to 20 kHz: a healthy adult on consumer speakers usually hears 30 Hz to 16 kHz continuously, with optional gaps in the deep bass on small drivers. The pink-noise stereo image test should sound centered with no pull to either side.

What is the difference between stereo balance and channel test?

A channel test sends a signal to exactly one output at a time to verify that each speaker is alive and wired to the correct side. It answers the binary question is my left speaker working. A balance test sends an identical signal to both outputs simultaneously and asks whether they are matched in level so that a centered mono source (a voice in a movie, a kick drum) appears to come from straight ahead. Differences greater than about 1.5 dB between channels are audible as image pull. If your channel test passes but balance fails, the cause is usually an OS balance slider off-center, an asymmetric room, or one ear blocked by wax — not a hardware fault.

Why can I not hear the 20 Hz tone or the 20 kHz tone?

Almost nobody hears the absolute ends of the audible spectrum. The bottom end depends on driver size and cabinet tuning: 20 Hz needs an eight-inch woofer or larger in a tuned enclosure, so laptops, phones, and most bookshelf speakers cleanly cut off around 60 to 80 Hz. The top end depends on age — adults lose roughly one kHz of high-frequency hearing per decade after age twenty, so a healthy thirty-year-old usually tops out near 16 kHz, a fifty-year-old near 12 kHz, and few people over sixty hear above 10 kHz. If you can hear 30 Hz and 14 kHz both clearly, your hardware and ears are within normal range.

What is stereo image and how should it sound?

Stereo image is the spatial illusion created by feeding slightly different signals to your left and right speakers, fooling the brain into placing virtual sound sources between them. A well-set-up stereo pair lets you point to where the singer, bass guitar, and hi-hat are located in a phantom soundstage that extends several meters wide. The image test plays the same pink noise in both channels with the right channel reversed in polarity; on a correctly wired and time-aligned system the sound should appear to come from a wide vague cloud around your head rather than collapsing to either speaker. Strong pull to one side indicates polarity, level, or distance mismatch.

What causes audio crackling, popping, or distortion?

Crackling under heavy load is almost always a software buffer issue: increase the audio buffer size in the OS or DAW from 256 to 512 or 1024 samples, close CPU-hungry apps, and disable Wi-Fi while testing Bluetooth speakers. Steady-state crackling at low volume is a loose cable or oxidised connector; wiggle the 3.5 mm jack and the speaker terminals. Distortion that scales with volume is clipping from driving the amplifier or DAC past its limits — turn down the source by 6 dB and turn up the speaker volume to compensate. Bluetooth dropouts are radio interference from microwaves, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, and USB 3.0 ports; move the dongle to a USB 2.0 port via extension.

What is the difference between dBA, dB SPL, and dBFS?

dB SPL is sound pressure level measured by a microphone, referenced to the threshold of human hearing at 20 micropascals; it is the right unit for absolute loudness in a room. dBA is dB SPL after an A-weighting filter that de-emphasises very low and very high frequencies to approximate how loud a sound seems to humans; it is used for occupational noise limits (85 dBA over eight hours is the OSHA action level). dBFS is decibels relative to full scale inside a digital file or DAC and has no direct loudness meaning until decoded by an amplifier and speaker. Speaker tests report tone amplitude in dBFS; an SPL meter app reports actual room loudness in dBA.

How do I test a 5.1 or 7.1 surround speaker setup?

First confirm the operating system is set to the matching multichannel configuration in Windows Sound, macOS Audio MIDI Setup, or Linux PulseAudio. Then run a dedicated per-channel test that walks through Front Left, Front Right, Center, Subwoofer, Surround Left, Surround Right, and for 7.1 the additional Back Left and Back Right. Each channel should play independently so you can verify the cable maps to the labeled speaker — a common wiring fault swaps Center with Subwoofer because both are mono. After the per-channel pass, run a calibration tone (white or pink noise at minus twenty dBFS) and use an SPL meter app to set every speaker to the same level at the listening position, typically 75 dB SPL for home theater.

Does this speaker test work in the browser without uploading audio?

Yes. The tool synthesizes every test tone locally using the Web Audio API's OscillatorNode and BufferSource nodes, then routes them to the browser's AudioContext.destination which connects directly to your operating system's audio output. No audio file is downloaded, no microphone is opened, and no telemetry is sent. The frequency sweep is generated in real time by an oscillator whose frequency parameter is automated from 20 to 20000 Hz, and the pink-noise stereo test fills a stereo buffer with filtered random samples computed in JavaScript. You can open the Network tab in developer tools, run a full test pass, and confirm zero requests fire — the page works fully offline after first load.