Microphone test

How to read the result

The bar shows the level of the sound the browser receives, from −60 dBFS on the left to 0 dBFS, the loudest a digital signal can be, on the right. The thin marker holds the latest peak for a second and a half and turns red when it touches full scale. For ordinary speech at the distance you will really sit, the loudest words should land somewhere between −20 and −6 dBFS. Lower than that still works, but the person on the other end hears more hiss when their app turns you up. Higher, and a laugh or a cough will clip.

Clipping means the signal hit full scale and the tops of the waveform were cut off. It sounds harsh and distorted, and no software can repair it afterwards. If the page reports it, turn the input gain down, either on the microphone or interface (the gain knob on a Focusrite Scarlett, a Blue Yeti or a Shure MV7) or in the system's sound settings, until the loudest moment stays under −3 dBFS.

Background noise is measured in the quiet moments between your words: it is the level of the quietest tenth of the last five seconds. A quiet bedroom with a decent USB microphone reads around −60 dBFS or lower. A laptop's built-in microphone next to its own fan often sits at −45 dBFS or above, which listeners hear as a constant hiss under your voice. That is the easiest number to improve: close the window, turn off the fan, and move the microphone closer to you, not the gain up.

When the meter does not move at all

If the page says it is receiving digital silence, every sample it gets is exactly zero. A quiet room never does that; there is always some noise. It means something switched the microphone off before the sound reached the browser. The usual causes, in the order worth checking:

• A mute button or switch on the microphone, the headset cable or the USB interface. Many gaming headsets (HyperX, SteelSeries, Razer) mute when the boom is flipped up.
• On a Mac: System Settings › Privacy & Security › Microphone, where your browser has to be switched on. macOS asks once, and if that prompt was dismissed, every site gets silence. On Windows: Settings › Privacy & security › Microphone, where both "Microphone access" and "Let desktop apps access your microphone" have to be on.
• The input is muted or set to 0 in the system's sound settings, or a different device is selected. If the list above the meter shows more than one microphone, try each one; laptops with a webcam and a headset plugged in often have three.

If the browser refuses the microphone outright, the page says so and how to allow it. If it says the microphone is in use, another program is holding it exclusively. Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Discord, OBS and some audio interface control panels do this on Windows. Close them and press Start again.

Call processing on and off

Browsers apply three treatments to a microphone by default, built for video calls: echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain control. This page starts with all three off, so you hear what the microphone itself picks up. Tick Call processing to hear what Google Meet, Zoom in a browser or Discord's web app will send. Noise suppression removes a steady fan but also thins out the voice. Automatic gain makes a quiet microphone sound louder, and it pumps the background up in the pauses. If the two sound very different, the problem is the room or the microphone placement, not the microphone.

The panel at the bottom lists what the browser actually delivered: the device, the sample rate, the number of channels and whether each treatment is on. Browsers sometimes ignore a request. Chrome opens most built-in microphones in mono at 48 kHz whatever was asked, and Safari often reports less. A USB microphone that reports 44,100 Hz is fine; recording software chooses its own rate anyway.

One side of a stereo input is silent

If two bars appear and only the left one moves, the microphone is plugged into input 1 of a two-input interface, or it is a single-capsule USB microphone that presents itself as stereo. That is normal. Video-call apps use it as mono and hear you fine. A recording made on this site in stereo would have your voice in one ear, so record in mono (the voice recorder does by default) or fold the file with stereo to mono.

Hearing yourself

Record 5 seconds captures the raw samples the meter is reading and plays them straight back. It is the most honest test there is: you hear the room, the distance and the tone exactly as the microphone delivers them. You can save the clip as a WAV file if a support desk or a colleague asks for one. Hear yourself live sends the microphone to your speakers as you talk. Use headphones for that, or the speakers feed back into the microphone and howl. Expect a slight delay; browsers add a few tens of milliseconds.

To record properly once the microphone checks out, use the voice recorder. It saves WAV, MP3 or FLAC, and its studio mode keeps the full quality with processing off. If the test clip sounds noisy, noise reduction or speech enhancement will clean up a finished recording. Neither can fix clipping, so get the level right here first.

Privacy

The sound goes into this tab, is measured and drawn, and is thrown away. The five-second test clip stays in the page's memory until you leave or record another, and it only leaves your device if you download it. The browser shows its microphone indicator for as long as the test runs, and Stop switches the microphone off completely.