Frequency Response Test
Play pure sine tones from 20 Hz to 20 kHz to hear how your headphones or speakers handle the full spectrum. Use the slider, presets, or a full sweep to find where your gear rolls off.
Start around 50% volume and turn up slowly — pure tones sound quieter than music but carry the same energy.
Set volume to 50% or less before playing — sine tones carry more energy than they seem, especially in the treble.
Run one sweep to map the range, then use presets to sit on any frequency that vanished, jumped, or rattled.
Silence above 15 kHz is usually your hearing, not the hardware. Missing bass on laptop speakers is the speaker.
Frequency response is how evenly your audio gear reproduces sound across the spectrum, from sub-bass at 20 Hz to the highest treble at 20 kHz. No speaker or headphone is perfectly flat: small drivers give up on deep bass, cheap tweeters fade early, and many products deliberately boost the bass or highs to sound more exciting. Sweeping a pure tone through the range makes those choices audible — you hear exactly where the sound gets quieter, distorts, or disappears. Everything runs locally in your browser — no signup, no downloads.
The test generates a mathematically pure sine wave with the Web Audio API, so exactly one frequency reaches your ears at a time — anything else you hear (buzzing, rattling, a note that jumps in volume or vanishes) is your equipment or your ears, not the recording. Volume changes along a sweep are normal: equal-loudness curves mean human hearing is far more sensitive around 2–5 kHz than at the extremes. What you are listening for is the points where a tone becomes inaudible, distorts, or makes the speaker cabinet rattle.
Testing headphones vs. speakers
Decent headphones should produce a clean, audible tone from roughly 20 Hz to the top of your hearing — if sub-bass below 40 Hz is silent, that is usually the headphone, since even budget drivers sealed against your ear move enough air. Speakers are different: desktop and laptop speakers physically cannot reproduce sub-bass, and most roll off between 60 and 200 Hz. Sweep upward from 20 Hz and note the first frequency you actually hear — that is the real low end of your system, and a subwoofer’s crossover should sit just above where the main speakers fade.
Why can’t I hear the highest frequencies?
Probably nothing is broken. Adult hearing rarely reaches 20 kHz: the upper limit falls with age, from around 18–20 kHz in teenagers to 12–15 kHz by middle age, so a silent 16 kHz tone with working playback is normal. To separate ears from equipment, nudge the volume up where the tone vanished — if it appears, the gear reproduces it and your threshold simply sits nearby. A couple of real hardware limits exist too: some Bluetooth codecs and cheap DACs go quiet in the top octave, and a sample rate below 44.1 kHz cannot reproduce 20 kHz at all. One warning worth repeating: high frequencies at high volume are fatiguing and can damage hearing — keep the volume low and sessions short.
The audio spectrum, band by band
| Band | Range | What lives there |
|---|---|---|
| Sub-bass | 20–60 Hz | Felt as much as heard — cinema rumble, 808s, pipe organ pedals. Needs a subwoofer or good headphones. |
| Bass | 60–200 Hz | Kick drums and bass guitar. The lowest range most speakers can genuinely produce. |
| Low mids | 200–500 Hz | Warmth and body — male vocals, guitars, the lower half of a piano. |
| Mids | 500 Hz–2 kHz | Presence and clarity. Voices and most instruments center here; almost anything can play it. |
| High mids | 2–6 kHz | Definition and attack — consonants, snare crack, cymbal strikes. Hearing is most sensitive here. |
| Treble | 6–20 kHz | Air and sparkle — the shimmer of cymbals and the sense of space. The first range lost to age. |