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Test your speakers.
Check left/right balance, then sweep through bass, mid, and treble to catch rattling or distortion before it ruins a call or a track.
Step 1 — check both speakers work and are balanced.
Step 2 — check for rattling or distortion at different frequencies.
Understanding a speaker test
How this differs from a microphone test
A microphone test checks input — what your device picks up and sends out. A speaker test checks the opposite: output, what actually reaches the room from your device. These fail independently, so it's entirely possible for your mic to work perfectly while your speakers are silent, or the reverse — which is exactly why call software usually asks you to test both separately rather than assuming one working means the other does too.
Testing stereo and left-right channels
Most desktop and laptop speaker setups are stereo — a distinct left and right channel — even when the two speakers sit close together or are built into the same chassis. A channel test plays a tone through one side only, which is the fastest way to catch a speaker that's gone fully silent, a cable that's come loose on one side, or a software balance setting that's drifted without you noticing. It also catches a subtler problem: audio panned correctly in the source but collapsed to mono somewhere in the output chain, which sounds "fine" on casual listening but loses spatial detail in music, games, and some video calls.
Rattling, distortion, and frequency sweeps
Sweeping through bass, mid, and treble separately matters because speaker failures are often frequency-specific rather than affecting the whole range equally. A rattle that only shows up on bass usually points to something physically loose — a grille, a nearby object resonating, or a worn driver surround — rather than an electrical fault, since low frequencies move the most air and physically excite anything nearby that isn't firmly seated. Distortion concentrated in treble more often points to a blown or damaged tweeter, or the volume simply being pushed past what a small built-in speaker can cleanly reproduce.
Why testing output matters before a call
Speaker problems don't just mean you miss what's said — they can actively cause echo and feedback for everyone else on the call. If your speaker volume is too high relative to your microphone's pickup, your mic recaptures the other person's own voice coming out of your speakers and sends it back to them, creating an audible echo of their own words with a slight delay; push that further and it can build into a feedback loop. Checking output level and quality beforehand — not just whether sound comes out, but how loud relative to your mic's sensitivity — heads off a problem that's otherwise really only noticeable to everyone except the person causing it.
Next step
If you're testing headphones rather than desktop speakers, the failure modes are a bit different — run our headphone test instead to check channel balance and connection type specifically.
FAQ
One speaker is quieter than the other — is it broken?+
Not necessarily. Run the left/right test above first. If both play at equal volume here but sound unequal in other apps, it's a software balance setting, not the speaker. If it's genuinely quieter here too, check the cable/connection before assuming the speaker itself has failed.
Why does the bass tone rattle but mid and treble sound fine?+
A rattle specifically at low frequencies usually means something physically loose — a speaker grille, a nearby object vibrating, or a loose driver mount. Try moving the speaker away from anything it could be touching and test again.
Can this test surround sound (5.1/7.1) setups?+
Browsers reliably output stereo (left/right) for web audio regardless of how many physical speakers you have connected — so this test checks your main stereo pair. For full multi-channel testing, use your sound card manufacturer's own control panel.