Speaker / Channel Test

What to listen for

1. 1

   Press Left. The sound should come from your left, and only from your left. If it comes from the right, your speakers or headphones are swapped.

2. 2

   Press Right and check the same thing on the other side.

3. 3

   Press Both. It should sit in the middle, between the two, and sound equally loud on each side. If it pulls to one side, something is unbalanced.

4. 4

   Listen for the tone itself: it should be steady and clean. Buzzing, crackling or a rattle usually means a damaged driver or something loose in the speaker enclosure.

If one side is silent

Work outward from the simplest cause. Check the balance control in your system's sound settings, which can be knocked off center and is easy to forget. Try the same test with headphones plugged in, and then with them out: that tells you whether the fault is in the speakers or before them. Wiggle the cable near the plug, where cables fail first.

On Bluetooth, disconnect and reconnect before concluding anything — a wireless pair can connect in mono, which sounds exactly like a dead channel and is not one.

What this page cannot tell you

It plays a 520 Hz tone and nothing more. It cannot measure how loud your speakers are, how flat they are, or how good they sound — a browser has no idea what is connected or how far away you are sitting, and there is no decibel figure anywhere on this site for that reason.

It also cannot tell a bad speaker from a bad recording, or fix a channel that is silent because of a driver problem. What it does is narrow the question: one side, both sides, or something before them.

To choose the frequency yourself, use the Tone Generator; to sweep across the range, the Hearing Range Test. For the other direction — whether your microphone is picking anything up — there is the Microphone Test.