Bass & Subwoofer Test

Sweep the low end from 20 Hz to 200 Hz and hear where your speakers actually begin to produce sound — then use the kick to check how they handle impact.

Hearing nothing is the expected result on most hardware. Laptop and phone speakers produce essentially nothing below about 150 Hz. That is a limit of physics, not a fault in the speaker or in this page.

Subwoofer kick

A repeated low burst rather than a continuous tone. Sustained tones tell you what a driver can reproduce; an impulse tells you how it starts and stops, which is where a loose port or an over-driven cone gives itself away.

What this tool does and does not do

It measures nothing. There is no microphone involved, no calibration, and no way for a web page to know what sound pressure is arriving in your room. What it does is play a known signal and tell you exactly what that signal is, so you can listen and draw your own conclusion. "My speakers go quiet below 80 Hz" is a genuinely useful thing to learn, and this is enough to learn it. "My speakers are 3 dB down at 62 Hz" is not something any browser can tell you.

Where your bass actually starts

Run the sweep and watch the readout while you listen. Somewhere on the way up, the sound will appear — that point is roughly where your system stops being silent, and it is usually much higher than people expect. A phone speaker may give you nothing until 300 Hz or above. A laptop typically starts somewhere between 150 and 250 Hz. Small desktop speakers often manage 80 to 100 Hz. A bookshelf speaker with a real woofer might reach 50 Hz, and a subwoofer is the only thing in a normal home that will do anything meaningful at 30 Hz.

Below roughly 20 Hz there is nothing to hear at all: that is the bottom of human hearing, and what remains is pressure you feel rather than pitch you hear. This tool starts at 20 Hz for that reason.

Hearing bass and feeling bass

Low frequencies work on the body as much as on the ears. At 40 Hz, much of what you notice is your chest, the desk, and the floor rather than your hearing as such. This is why bass is the most easily faked part of audio reproduction: a small speaker that cannot move enough air at 60 Hz can produce the harmonics of 60 Hz instead, and the brain fills in a fundamental that is not physically there. It sounds like bass. It is not bass. The sweep exposes this immediately, because a pure tone has no harmonics to lean on — either the driver moves the air or you hear silence.

Finding rattles

Most of what people diagnose as speaker distortion in the bass is the room. A sweep excites every resonance in turn, and somewhere between 40 and 120 Hz you will often find a frequency where something buzzes: a cupboard door, a loose grille, a picture frame, a radiator, a laptop chassis. Note the frequency from the readout, then run the sweep again and put a hand on the suspect while it passes through. If the buzz stops, you have found it — and your speaker is fine. Those resonances are a property of the room, not of the speaker — speaker placement and room acoustics basics explains why bass response depends so heavily on exactly where the speaker and your ears are, and why the same speaker can sound completely different a few feet to either side.

Port noise is the other common find, and it is the one the kick is for. A vented speaker pushed hard can produce a chuffing or huffing sound from the port itself, most audibly on transients rather than on steady tones. If the kick sounds clean at a low level and turns into a puff of air as you raise the volume, the speaker is being asked for more than it can deliver.

If something sounds wrong, lower the level first

Bass is where amplifiers and drivers run out of headroom first, and a distorted low tone is far more likely to be a speaker at its limit than a fault. Turn the system volume down and listen again: if it cleans up, nothing is broken. Sustained high-level low frequencies are also the fastest way to damage a driver, so there is no reason to run these tests loud — everything they can tell you is audible at a moderate level.

Not sure where the problem is? Run the full sound check: six quick questions, and one summary that points you at the right tool.