Microphone test

Test your microphone online in a few seconds

This microphone test tells you in a few seconds whether your mic works and how it sounds. Click Start, allow access and speak: a large badge confirms “Your microphone works” as soon as a speech-level signal arrives, or explains what to check when no sound is detected. Meanwhile a level meter in dBFS, a live waveform and a frequency spectrum show exactly what the microphone captures.

It works with any input your browser can see: built-in laptop mic, USB microphone, headset, webcam, audio interface or Bluetooth earbuds. Use it before a Zoom, Teams, Google Meet or Discord call, a job interview or an online class, to set your gain before streaming or podcasting, or to find out why people cannot hear you. A test recording lets you hear yourself much as the people on the other end do.

1. Start the test

   Click “Start the microphone test” and accept the browser prompt. Nothing happens before this click, and nothing is uploaded.

2. Pick your microphone

   If you have several inputs, choose the right one in the “Microphone” list: headset, webcam, USB mic or built-in microphone. Switching restarts the test instantly.

3. Speak and read the verdict

   Talk normally or count to five. The badge shows “Your microphone works”, “Very weak signal” or “No sound detected” with fixes, and a red warning appears if the signal clips.

4. Record a test clip

   Choose 5, 10 or 30 s in “Clip length”, click “Record a test clip”, then listen to the automatic playback. Use “Download” to keep the file.

5. Compare, then stop

   Toggle echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain control (all on by default) to hear their effect, then click “Stop the test” to release the microphone.

How the level meter and the verdict work

The page opens the microphone with getUserMedia and analyses it with the Web Audio API. On every screen refresh (usually 60 times per second) it reads the last 2,048 samples (about 43 ms at 48 kHz), computes their RMS (root mean square, the average energy) and their peak, and converts both to dBFS with 20 × log10(value), where 1.0 is full scale (0 dBFS).

• Level (RMS): the smoothed average level, the best indicator of how loud your voice is; the bar spans −60 to 0 dBFS.
• Peak: the loudest sample, held for 1.5 s on the bar (the thin vertical marker), then falling back at 20 dB per second.
• Verdict: “works” once the RMS level has spent at least 0.3 s in total above −45 dBFS; “No sound detected” if nothing exceeds −60 dBFS for 5 s; below −90 dBFS the signal is treated as digital silence (muted input).
• Clipping: samples at 98.9% of full scale or more (about −0.1 dBFS); the warning appears after 3 clipping events within 5 s or 0.3 s of continuous clipping.
• Background noise: the 10th percentile of recent RMS readings, which mostly captures the pauses between your words.
• Spectrum: a 4,096-point FFT drawn on a logarithmic scale from 40 Hz to 20 kHz; most speech energy sits below 4 kHz, which is why telephone audio (300 Hz to 3.4 kHz) stays intelligible.
• Technical details: device name, sample rate (often 48 kHz), channel count, input latency, processing status and recording format (WebM/Opus in Chrome, for example), as far as the browser reports them.

What your microphone level means

When to run a microphone test

• Before a video call: check your audio for Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet or Discord in 10 seconds, instead of asking “can you hear me?” at the start of the meeting.
• Remote interviews and exams: make sure the right microphone is selected and loud enough before a job interview, an online exam or a remote class.
• New hardware: test a USB microphone, gaming headset, webcam or audio interface right after plugging it in, and compare several inputs from the list.
• Streaming and podcasting: turn off the three browser processing options, which change the level, then set your gain so that your voice sits around −20 dBFS with peaks well below 0 dBFS before you go live in OBS or start recording.
• Troubleshooting: when people say they cannot hear you, the verdict, the digital-silence detection and the tips quickly show whether the issue is permissions, mute, device choice or level.

Common microphone problems and how to fix them

• Access blocked: once you have clicked Block, the browser stops asking. Allow the microphone from the icon in the address bar, and check the Windows or macOS privacy settings, which can block every browser at once.
• Wrong default input: the system often picks the webcam or the built-in mic instead of your headset. Choose the right one in the list, then make it the default input in your sound settings.
• Signal too low: raise the input volume (Windows: Settings > System > Sound > Input; macOS: System Settings > Sound > Input), get closer, and check that automatic gain control is on (it is by default).
• Clipping and distortion: lower the gain or input volume and turn off microphone boost if your Windows driver offers it (classic Sound control panel, Recording tab, microphone Properties, Levels tab).
• Microphone busy: some drivers give one app exclusive access. Close Zoom, Teams, Discord or OBS, or turn off exclusive mode in the Windows recording device properties (Advanced tab).

Everything happens on your device: the audio is analysed in real time by your browser, never uploaded, and the test clip stays in memory: it is written to disk only if you download it, and it is discarded when you close the page. “Stop the test” stops every audio track and closes the audio engine, so the recording indicator disappears. Limits: the meter shows the digital level (dBFS), not the loudness in the room (dB SPL); the verdict is designed for speech; some browsers do not report latency or processing settings; and device names depend on what the browser exposes.