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Test your headphones.
A stereo tone plays through the channel you pick. If a side is silent or too quiet, you'll know immediately whether it's the headphones or something else.
Put your headphones on, then play each side. You should hear the tone only in the matching ear.
Understanding a headphone test
How this differs from a microphone test
A microphone test checks what your device can capture and send out; a headphone test checks the exact opposite direction — what actually reaches your ears from a given output device. The two failures look completely different in practice: a broken mic means the other person on a call can't hear you at all, while broken or misconfigured headphones mean you can't hear them, even though your own audio is going out fine. It's worth testing both separately before a call, because a one-sided problem in either direction is easy to misdiagnose as "the call is broken" when it's actually just one specific piece of hardware.
Wired vs. Bluetooth headphones
Wired headphones are the simplest case: the signal is analog and direct, so if a channel fails it's almost always the jack, the cable, or the driver itself. Bluetooth adds a layer of pairing and codec negotiation in between — a headset can connect successfully (you hear a chime, the OS shows it as active) while still failing to actually route audio correctly if the connection profile didn't negotiate properly. If Bluetooth headphones fail this test but a wired pair works fine on the same device, try unpairing and re-pairing, or check whether the headphones are also trying to act as a microphone (the hands-free profile), which on some systems downgrades the output audio quality as a side effect.
Mono vs. stereo issues
Not every silent channel is a hardware fault — some accessibility settings (a "Mono Audio" toggle on Windows, macOS, and iOS) deliberately merge both channels into a single signal sent to both ears, which is useful for anyone with hearing loss in one ear but will make any left/right test report both sides as active even if a physical channel is actually dead. If a stereo test seems to fail confusingly — both sides play, but a music track sounds collapsed and center-heavy — check that mono setting before assuming the headphones themselves are at fault.
Audio jack vs. USB-C / Lightning
A 3.5mm jack is a mechanical, physical connection — its most common failure is a bent pin, lint packed into the port, or a jack that's been inserted at a slight angle, all of which tend to produce one-sided or intermittent audio rather than total silence. USB-C and Lightning headphones instead rely on a small onboard DAC (digital-to-analog converter) inside the cable or the headphones themselves, so their failures tend to be all-or-nothing — either the device is recognized and works, or it isn't recognized at all — and a loose or low-quality cable is a more common cause of trouble than with a standard jack.
Next step
If the issue turns out to be your room or your desktop speakers instead of headphones, run our speaker test to isolate whether the problem follows the output device or the source.
FAQ
I can only hear sound in one ear — what's wrong?+
First confirm it's not the headphones themselves: play the left/right test above. If only one side plays here too, check the 3.5mm jack for lint or a bent pin, or try a different port/device — the same headphones failing on two different devices points to a hardware fault, not a software one.
Why does the balance sound off even though both sides play?+
Check your OS-level balance slider (Windows Sound settings → Device properties → Levels → Balance; macOS → Sound → Output → Balance). It's easy to nudge accidentally and it affects every app, not just one.
Does this work with Bluetooth headphones?+
Yes — the test plays through whichever output device your browser is currently using, wired or Bluetooth.