Microphone Test Online
This microphone test tells you in about ten seconds whether your mic works and what it actually sounds like. The level meter moves while you speak, the spectrum shows which frequencies arrive, and a five-second recording plays straight back so you hear what Discord, Zoom or Teams would hear. No plugin, no sign-in, and no audio leaves the page.
How to test your mic
Press Start microphone and allow the browser prompt. The percentage and the bar under it are your live input level, and the spectrum below fills in as sound arrives. Speak at normal call distance — a headset boom a few centimetres from your mouth, a desk mic 15–30 cm away — and watch the meter.
A normal voice should push the meter into the 40–80% band and fall back to near zero between sentences. Barely leaving 10% means the gain is too low or you are talking into the wrong end of the mic. Pinning at 100% on every syllable is clipping, which sounds crunchy to everyone else. A meter that never moves is not a quality problem at all — it is a device, permission or mute problem, and the checklist below covers those in order.
What the spectrum is telling you
Speech energy sits mostly between 100 Hz and 4 kHz, so that region should light up when you talk and go quiet when you stop. A permanent bar at the far left with nobody talking is rumble — a fan, air conditioning, or mains hum in an analogue cable. A permanent wash across the top is hiss, usually from boost cranked up to cover a mic that is too far away.
Mic test with playback
A moving meter proves the mic is alive. It does not prove you sound acceptable — that is what Record 5s is for. It captures five seconds, stops on its own and hands you a player. Wear headphones, or the playback re-enters the mic and you are judging a loop.
Listen for four faults. Crackle on loud syllables is clipping: lower the input level or boost. Muffled, underwater speech usually means a Bluetooth headset switched to its hands-free profile, or the mic is aimed at your chin. Hiss or buzz points at boost, a cheap analogue jack, or a USB port shared with a charger. Hollow, roomy speech is desk and wall reflection; only moving closer fixes it.
One honest limit: browsers apply echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain control by default. That fairly simulates a call, since Discord and Teams do the same, but it is not a studio measurement — a thin or pumping clip is partly automatic gain riding your level.
Discord, Zoom and Teams setup
The most common complaint on support forums is that a mic passes a browser mic test but the app hears nothing. On Windows that is the split permission model: the browser holds its own grant, desktop apps a separate one. Open Settings › Privacy & security › Microphone and enable both Microphone access and Let desktop apps access your microphone — the second is what leaves web tests working and Discord silent. On macOS, use System Settings › Privacy & Security › Microphone, then restart the app.
After permissions, each app has one setting that commonly swallows a working mic:
- Discord — in
Voice & Video, pick the input by name rather than "Default", set Input Sensitivity to manual with the threshold below your speaking level, and turn Noise Suppression off. Still nothing: Audio Subsystem to Legacy, then Reset Voice Settings. - Zoom — you must actually Join with Computer Audio; a meeting joined without it passes every settings test and still transmits nothing. Then uncheck Automatically adjust microphone volume.
- Teams — in
Settings › Devices, choose the device explicitly, then run Make a test call.
If this page hears you and the app does not, the hardware is fine — check permissions and the app's input selector first.
When the meter never moves: fix it in this order
Work down the list and stop at the first step that changes something.
- Permission. Click the padlock in the address bar; a prompt that never appeared usually means an old "Block" is remembered. Reset it and reload.
- A hardware mute. Inline mutes, flip-up boom arms and laptop mic keys all give a healthy device with a flat meter.
- The wrong default device. Watch the system's own level bar in
Sound › Input: moving there but not here means the browser is on another device; flat there too puts the fault below the browser. - Another app holding it. Close Zoom, Discord and OBS, and untick Allow applications to take exclusive control in Advanced properties.
- The jack. A combo port needs a 4-pole TRRS plug seated fully; a 3-pole or half-inserted plug registers as headphones with no mic.
- The driver. If this began after a Windows feature update, roll the audio driver back, or uninstall the device with "Delete the driver software" ticked and reboot.
- Hardware or software? Try the mic in another browser, then a phone — failing everywhere means hardware.
If nothing shows anywhere, check the other direction: the general sound test confirms playback works, since a dead output looks like a dead input when you test by ear.
Why you can't hear yourself
This page deliberately does not pipe the microphone back to your speakers live: the speakers would feed the mic and you would get the feedback squeal everyone knows from school assemblies. A browser monitor also adds roughly 20–100 ms of delay, enough to make your voice hard to talk over. The playback clip answers the real question instead — what do other people hear?
For continuous monitoring, use the operating system with headphones on: on Windows, tick Listen to this device under Recording › your mic › Properties › Listen, then turn it off afterwards, since leaving it on is a common cause of echo. macOS has no equivalent switch — use hardware monitoring on a headset or interface.
While the headphones are on, check them too: the left right speaker test plays each channel alone to catch swapped or dead sides, and the tone generator sweeps a pure sine to show where a driver stops reproducing bass or treble.
Nothing is recorded or uploaded
Your audio never leaves the browser. The microphone stream feeds the page's own Web Audio analyser to draw the meter and spectrum, and Record 5s holds that clip in memory as a blob with a temporary in-page URL. There is no upload, no server call and no storage: closing or reloading the tab discards it. Nobody, including us, can retrieve the recording — there is nothing to retrieve.
Pressing Stop microphone releases the audio tracks, which turns off the recording indicator in the tab. Permission is per-site and revocable from the padlock menu, and no account or sign-in is needed.
Frequently asked questions
My mic works in this test but not in Discord. How do I fix it?
Windows is granting the browser permission but not the desktop app. Open Settings › Privacy & security › Microphone and enable both Microphone access and Let desktop apps access your microphone — that second toggle is exactly what leaves browser tests working while Discord stays silent. Then in Discord, under User Settings › Voice & Video, select your mic by name instead of "Default", set Input Sensitivity to manual, and turn Noise Suppression off while you test.
Audio works in Zoom's test but participants can't hear me. Why?
You most likely joined the meeting without computer audio, or Zoom is using a different input than the one the test used. In the meeting click Join Audio › Join with Computer Audio, then use the caret beside the mic icon to select your device by name. Also open Settings › Audio, uncheck Automatically adjust microphone volume and set background noise suppression to Low, because aggressive suppression gates a quiet mic that passed the test.
Why is my mic so quiet in some apps but fine in others?
Every app keeps its own input gain, so one low setting explains it. Open the Windows Sound control panel, go to Recording › your mic › Properties › Levels, set Microphone to 100 and add Microphone Boost only if needed — each +10 dB of boost raises hiss as much as your voice. Then fix the app itself: Discord's input volume slider, Zoom's automatic gain checkbox. Moving 5–10 cm closer beats any boost setting.
My microphone stopped working after a Windows 11 update. What do I do?
Roll the audio driver back first. In Device Manager open Audio inputs and outputs › your mic › Properties › Driver › Roll Back Driver; if that button is greyed out, uninstall the device with "Delete the driver software for this device" ticked and reboot so Windows reinstalls it. Then re-check Privacy & security › Microphone, because feature updates — 24H2 in particular — have reset per-app microphone permissions. Install the audio driver from your laptop maker rather than the generic one.
My laptop has one combo jack and my headset mic isn't detected. What now?
The port sensed headphones, not a headset. A combo jack needs a 4-pole TRRS plug pushed fully home; a 3-pole plug, a splitter cable, or a plug seated a millimetre short registers as output only, so no recording device appears. In the Sound control panel's Recording tab, right-click and enable Show Disabled Devices and Show Disconnected Devices, and answer "Headset" if the Realtek jack-detection popup asks. Otherwise a USB audio adapter bypasses the jack entirely.
Why does my AirPods mic sound muffled on calls?
Bluetooth drops to a narrowband voice profile the moment the mic is used. Sending microphone audio switches the link from high-quality A2DP output to the hands-free profile, which samples your voice at 8 kHz (or 16 kHz on wideband mSBC) — hence the underwater sound. On iPhone, set Settings › Bluetooth › AirPods › Microphone to Always Left or Always Right instead of Automatic, and change Mic Mode from Voice Isolation to Standard in Control Center.