Microphone Test

About the Microphone Test

The Microphone Test opens your microphone only when you press Start, shows the signal arriving, and lets you record and hear a short sample — all inside the page.

Level, waveform and a sample you can hear

The meter shows the level now and the loudest peak so far; the waveform shows the last few seconds. A recording of up to ten seconds is kept in the tab and played back with its own waveform, which you can click to jump through. Hearing yourself is the fastest way to catch a muffled headset, a noisy fan or a microphone that is simply too far away.

dBFS is not how loud the room is

The levels here are dBFS: decibels relative to the largest value the recording chain can store, so 0 dBFS is the ceiling and every normal reading is negative. That scale is the right one for setting a microphone — aim for speaking peaks between −18 and −6 dBFS, and avoid touching 0, which is clipping. It is not a sound level meter. Measuring how loud a room is needs a calibrated microphone and a different scale, dB SPL.

Raw, on purpose

The test asks the browser to switch off echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain, so you hear the microphone itself. The results show whether the browser actually honoured each of those requests. Call software normally leaves them on, which is why a call can sound cleaner than this test.

When nothing arrives

• Blocked: allow the microphone for this site from the address bar, and check your operating system’s microphone privacy settings let the browser use it.
• Silent but open: check a mute switch on the headset or cable, and pick the right device from the list.
• Busy: close call and recording programs, and other tabs using the microphone.
• Bluetooth sounds poor: opening the microphone switches most Bluetooth headsets into a mono, low-bandwidth mode. That is normal.

What stays on your device

The audio is analysed and recorded inside this tab only. The sample is never uploaded, is not saved unless you save it yourself, and is removed when you press Delete or leave the page. Stop releases the microphone immediately.

Related checks

• Webcam Test — check the camera before the same call.
• Speaker Test — check what you hear, not what you send.
• Audio Latency Test — a different question: how long a sound takes to travel out of your speakers and back in through the microphone.
• Voice Recorder — record something longer to a file.

Where this tool stops

This checks whether sound arrives and how it sounds. It cannot rate the quality of a microphone in absolute terms, measure room loudness, or see processing done by your operating system or headset before the browser receives the audio.