CheckMyBits

Headphone Test – Test Your Headphones and Earbuds Online

Check your headphones properly: left and right channels, stereo imaging, how low the bass reaches, how high the treble goes, and whether both drivers are wired the same way round. Put them on and turn the volume down first. It works for wired and Bluetooth headphones, earbuds and headsets.

Channels

Range

Runs in your browser. Nothing is recorded or uploaded.

How to test your headphones online

  1. Put your headphones on and check they are the right way round. The L and R markings are often very small, and wearing them reversed makes every channel test read backwards.
  2. Turn the volume to about a third. Pure tones are more fatiguing than music at the same level.
  3. Press Left ear, then Right ear. Each should be audible in one ear only.
  4. Run Bass sweep and press Mark the moment you first hear anything — that is where your headphones start producing sound.
  5. Run Frequency sweep and press Mark when the tone disappears, for the other end of the range.

What the results mean

Not working? Fix it

Sound from one side only
  1. Push the plug all the way in. A 3.5 mm plug that is one click short very commonly gives one channel only, and it feels seated.
  2. Wiggle the cable at the plug while a tone plays. Sound cutting in and out confirms a broken conductor — the most common headphone failure, and always at that exact point.
  3. Check the balance control: Settings → Accessibility → Audio on both iPhone and Android, and Sound → Balance on Windows and macOS. A slider pushed fully over is indistinguishable from a dead driver.
  4. For wireless earbuds, charge both sides fully and re-pair. One flat earbud looks exactly like a dead channel.
Weak or missing bass
  1. Change the ear tip size. On in-ears this is the whole game — a poor seal removes the bass entirely, and most people are using the tips that came fitted rather than the ones that fit them.
  2. Push the earbuds in a little further and twist to seat them, then run the bass sweep again and compare.
  3. Turn off any equaliser or "clear voice" preset, which commonly cut low frequencies to improve speech.
  4. Over Bluetooth, check which codec is in use. A headset profile used for calls is mono and heavily band-limited; it sounds dramatically worse than the stereo profile.
Channels swapped or imaging wrong
  1. Check the L and R markings. They are frequently tiny, and inside the headband rather than on the outside.
  2. Try the headphones on another device. If the sides swap there too, the headphones are at fault; if not, the adapter or dock is miswired.
  3. Check Mono Audio is off — Accessibility settings on every platform — since it collapses both channels and hides every imaging fault.
  4. USB-C adapters vary widely. Many cheap ones wire channels incorrectly or are passive where an active one is required.
Crackling, distortion and interference
  1. Lower the volume. Distortion only at high volume is the driver being pushed past what it can do, not a fault.
  2. On Bluetooth, move closer and away from microwaves, routers and USB 3 ports, all of which interfere with 2.4 GHz.
  3. Try a different source device to separate a headphone problem from a headphone-socket problem.
  4. Clean the 3.5 mm socket. Pocket lint compacts in the bottom and stops the plug seating fully, which produces exactly the one-channel and crackling symptoms above.
Linux
  1. Check the card profile first. Open pavucontrol → Configuration. Each sound card has a profile, and if it is set to “Off” or to HDMI when your speakers are analogue, you get silence with no error anywhere. This is the most common cause of no sound on Linux and it is invisible from the normal settings panel.
  2. Then check the output device. In the Playback tab, with the test above running, confirm your browser is routed to the right device. Per-application routing is a genuine feature here and it is easy to end up with one app pointed somewhere unexpected.
  3. Snap and Flatpak browsers need audio permission through a portal. If the rest of the system plays sound and only the browser is silent, check that first with Flatseal or flatpak permission-show.
  4. For Bluetooth, check the profile, not the volume. If the device connected as HSP/HFP — the headset profile used for calls — it is mono, heavily band-limited and sounds dreadful. Switch it to A2DP in pavucontrol → Configuration. Note that on most stacks you cannot use the microphone and high-quality A2DP audio at the same time.
  5. Confirm the kernel sees the card with aplay -l. If nothing is listed, it is a driver problem rather than a settings one.

Frequently asked questions

How do I test my headphones or earbuds?
Put them on with the volume low, then run the left and right channel test, the stereo imaging test and the frequency sweep. Together they show whether both sides work, how wide the stereo sounds, and how low and high the sound reaches.
How do I check if my left and right headphones are both working?
Run the left and right channel test. You should hear the tone only in the matching ear. If one side is silent, see the question about one side being completely silent below.
How is this different from the speaker test?
Headphones put a separate driver against each ear, so four things become testable that speakers in a room cannot show — the room mixes the two channels together before the sound reaches you, and that mixing destroys most of these tests. Stereo imaging, bass extension, frequency range and polarity all need headphones to mean anything. Use the speaker test for a laptop or desktop speakers, and this one for anything you wear.
What is the polarity test actually checking?
Whether both drivers push air in the same direction at the same moment. If one is wired backwards, the two cancel each other at low frequencies. Alone, each side sounds completely normal, which is why nothing else on this site would catch it. Played together, bass sounds thin and the sound seems to come from inside your head rather than in front of you. It is rare on factory headphones and common after a repair or a rewired cable.
I can only hear the bass sweep from about 80 Hz. Is that bad?
Not necessarily, and on in-ear headphones it is usually about fit rather than hardware. A poor seal destroys bass completely — swapping to a larger or smaller ear tip routinely moves this figure down by 30 Hz or more. On small on-ear headphones it is simply the size of the driver and no amount of adjustment will change it.
The frequency sweep disappears at 14 kHz. Are my headphones bad?
Probably not. Above roughly 15 kHz this test measures your ears at least as much as your headphones. Human hearing at the top of the range declines steadily from the late teens onward, and most adults over thirty stop hearing somewhere between 14 and 16 kHz. Nothing in music lives up there. If the result concerns you, try another pair first — cheap drivers roll off early and look identical to hearing loss in a test like this one.
What should the stereo imaging test sound like?
A single tone travelling smoothly from one ear to the other and back, passing cleanly through the middle of your head. Watch for it jumping rather than gliding, vanishing as it crosses the centre, or not reaching one side fully — each of those points at a channel imbalance or a failing driver.
Are the tones downloaded?
No. They are generated in your browser with the Web Audio API. A 20 Hz to 20 kHz sweep as an audio file would be hundreds of kilobytes, and a generated tone is exactly the frequency shown rather than whatever an encoder produced.
Is this safe for my ears?
The volume starts low and every change ramps rather than switching, which avoids the clicks that are genuinely unpleasant at headphone distance. That said, pure tones sound quieter than music at the same level and are more fatiguing, so start at about a third volume and raise it only if you need to. If anything is uncomfortable, press Stop rather than pushing through.
One side is completely silent.
Run the left and right checks first to confirm which side. Then wiggle the cable right where it meets the plug while a tone plays — that is where headphone cables fail, and sound cutting in and out confirms it. If the cable is detachable, swap it. If it is a wireless pair, charge both sides fully, since one flat earbud is indistinguishable from a dead channel.

Fix-it steps last checked against current operating system releases on 18 October 2026.