Speaker Test

How the Speaker Test works

Speakers fail in a handful of predictable ways: one side is silent, the channels are swapped, one driver is wired backwards, or the system cannot reproduce the bass or treble you expect. Each signal on this page targets one of those.

Running a speaker test for left and right

Choose Alternate left and right and the tone switches sides every one and a half seconds, with the panel naming the side that should be sounding. If sound comes from the wrong side, the cables or the headphones are swapped. If one side is silent throughout, check the cable, the balance control in your operating system's sound settings, and whether the device has a mono audio accessibility option switched on — that mixes both channels into each side and makes a left–right test look broken.

Pink noise. Pink noise has equal energy in every octave, so it sounds balanced to the ear in the way white noise, which is weighted to the treble, does not. It is the standard signal for comparing speakers and setting levels. Play it on each side in turn: a healthy pair sounds the same from both; a damaged tweeter sounds dull, and a torn cone buzzes or rattles.

Sweep. The sweep rises from 20 Hz to 20 kHz over twenty seconds on an exponential curve, so each octave takes the same time. The panel shows the current frequency. Listen for where the bass first becomes audible and where the treble disappears — laptop speakers typically start somewhere around 150–200 Hz, and adult hearing usually ends between 14 and 17 kHz, so silence at the top is often your ears, not the speakers. Rattles at a particular frequency point to a loose panel or a resonance in the room.

Polarity. If one speaker's wires are reversed, its cone moves out while the other moves in, and the bass from the two cancels. The polarity check plays an 80 Hz tone on both sides, flipping the right channel's polarity every three seconds. In a correctly wired pair the in-phase section sounds full and centred and the inverted section sounds thin and hard to place. If it is the other way round, one speaker is wired backwards; swap the red and black wires on one side.

Volume. The slider scales output on a squared curve, which tracks loudness more naturally than a straight line. Start low. A full-scale sine is far louder than most music, and high frequencies at high volume can damage tweeters and hearing.

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