Microphone test

How it works

Allow microphone access and speak: the bar shows your voice level in real time, with a peak indicator. If the bar moves when you talk, people on the call will hear you.

Monitoring

Enabling «monitor in headphones» lets you hear your own voice live: useful to know HOW you sound. Wear headphones, or you'll trigger feedback.

Privacy

Audio is never recorded or sent anywhere: the analysis happens in your browser and stops when you close the page.

The three near-certain causes of a silent microphone

The first is permission: the browser asks once and remembers the answer, so if you ever pressed «block» it will never ask again. It is fixed from the padlock or camera icon in the address bar. The second is the wrong device: with headphones connected the system may have selected the laptop microphone, or the other way round, and it is chosen from the list.

The third is exclusive use: on Windows and on Mac a video-call program left open in the background can hold the microphone, and nothing else can reach it. Closing that program completely, not just its window, is what works in most cases.

What the bar actually tells you

That the signal arrives, not that it sounds good. A level that barely moves when you speak normally means whoever is listening will have to turn the volume up, and turning it up brings the room noise with it. A level that constantly hits the top means the signal is too hot and the voice comes out distorted, and there lowering the listening volume does nothing: what has to come down is the input gain, in the system settings.

The right zone is where the bar sits halfway in normal speech and only approaches the top when you raise your voice. It is the same principle as a sound engineer setting levels before a concert: you leave headroom for the peaks.

Why people hear you badly even when the bar moves

The problem is nearly always the room, not the equipment. A space with bare walls and little furniture bounces the sound back, and the voice arrives distant and boomy: curtains, rugs, a sofa or even just a full bookshelf change the result more than a new microphone.

The other factor is distance: doubling the distance from the microphone drops the voice by six decibels, while the room noise stays the same. It is why speaking twenty centimetres from a cheap microphone sounds better than speaking a metre from an expensive one, and why headsets with a boom microphone work well despite being tiny.

Feedback, and where it comes from

Monitoring in headphones lets you hear yourself as others hear you, but without headphones the loudspeaker sound re-enters the microphone, gets amplified, comes out again, and within a second the howl starts: that is the Larsen effect, the same as microphones on a stage. It damages nothing, but it has to be switched off at once.

In video calls the same mechanism produces echo for the person listening: their voice comes out of your speakers, your microphone picks it up and sends it back. The automatic cancellation in calling software reduces it, but the sure remedy is headphones.

Nearby tools

To test the camera there is Webcam test, to actually record Voice recorder. To work on audio there are Audio trimmer, Audio converter and, for measuring the loudness of a video, Video loudness.