Speaker Water Eject
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Bass Test

Step through pure tones from 20 Hz to 150 Hz to find how low your speakers, subwoofer, or headphones really go, and to catch rattles before they become failures.

Start around 30%. Set the volume before putting headphones on, and keep steady tones at moderate levels.

Bass test

Step through the low tones from deepest upward. Phone speakers produce little below 150 Hz, so run this on the gear you actually want to judge: headphones, speakers, or a subwoofer.

Press a test button to play its tone. Press again to stop.

How do you test bass properly?

Start at the lowest tone and step upward at a fixed moderate volume, noting two things: where the sound becomes clearly audible, and whether any tone brings a buzz or rattle along with it. The first number is your system's practical bass floor; the second finding is the health check.

Judge feel as well as hearing at the bottom end. True 20-30 Hz output from a subwoofer registers as pressure as much as sound, which is why the deepest tones seem quiet even on systems reproducing them correctly. What matters is clean output at each step, not loudness.

What bass floor should each kind of gear reach?

Realistic expectations by hardware: dedicated subwoofers should produce clean output at 25-30 Hz and many reach 20 Hz; good over-ear headphones manage audible, clean 30-40 Hz; earbuds typically join between 40 and 60 Hz; desktop and bookshelf speakers between 50 and 80 Hz depending on size; laptop and phone speakers rarely produce anything meaningful below 150-200 Hz.

Missing bass below your hardware's physical class is not a defect. An earbud silent at 30 Hz is normal; a subwoofer silent at 40 Hz is broken or misconfigured. Test against the right expectation for the gear, and remember that ports, room corners, and eartip seal all move the practical floor.

What does rattling during a bass tone mean?

A rattle that rides on a bass tone has three usual sources: something near the speaker vibrating in sympathy, a loose part of the speaker's own enclosure or grille, or genuine driver damage. Sympathetic rattles, shelves, windows, objects on the same desk, change when you touch or move things nearby, which makes them easy to identify and harmless.

Enclosure and grille rattles persist when the surroundings are quiet and often live at one narrow band of frequencies. Driver damage sounds different: a papery, scratchy distortion across a wide range of bass tones that gets worse with volume. On a phone speaker, that same fizzy texture after water exposure is usually trapped water, which the water eject tool on this site addresses directly.

Why does my bass sound weaker than it used to?

For earbuds, the answer is usually the seal: a worn or wrong-size eartip leaks low frequencies dramatically, cutting perceived bass in half without any electrical fault. Try fresh tips and re-run the low tones; restored bass confirms the seal was the story. Blocked mesh from earwax has a similar muffling effect and gentle cleaning fixes it.

For speakers, check placement and settings first: moving a speaker away from a wall, an EQ profile reset, a crossover setting changed on a receiver, or a subwoofer volume knob nudged down all read as lost bass. Genuine driver aging exists, foam surrounds in older speakers do rot, but settings and placement explain most sudden changes.

Related tools

Water Eject

Play a low-frequency sweep for trapped speaker moisture.

Speaker Sound Test

Check your speaker with simple left/right test tones.

Tone Generator

Play test tones at any frequency in your browser.

Related guides

Are my headphones blown?

Distorted bass is the first sign of a damaged driver.

One earbud quieter than the other

A broken tip seal kills bass long before the driver does.

Phone speaker muffled after water

Why a wet speaker loses its low end, and how to clear it.

Questions

Which frequency should a subwoofer test start at?+

Start at 20 Hz at low volume. A healthy sub produces clean, felt output there or close to it, and stepping upward maps exactly where it hands off to your main speakers. If output only appears at 60-80 Hz, check the crossover and phase settings before blaming the driver.

Is playing deep bass tones bad for my speakers?+

Not at moderate volume. Speakers face more stress from clipping distortion at high volume than from clean low tones played sensibly. Keep sweeps at normal listening level; if you hear distortion, lower the volume rather than pushing through it.

Why can I feel 25 Hz but barely hear it?+

Human hearing is least sensitive at the lowest frequencies, so a tone reproduced at healthy level down there registers more as pressure and vibration than as loudness. Feeling it is passing the test. Equal-loudness curves mean 25 Hz needs enormous energy to sound as loud as 100 Hz.

My phone plays nothing below 150 Hz. Is it broken?+

No, that is physics. Phone speakers are tiny and cannot move enough air for deep bass; most roll off steeply below 150-200 Hz and some apply processing that fakes warmth using harmonics. Test phones for clarity and rattle at 150 Hz and above, and test real bass on headphones or speakers.

Should the bass sweep sound equally loud the whole way up?+

No. Expect it to start inaudible or felt-only, grow through the 40-80 Hz region, and even out from there; your gear's floor and your ears' sensitivity both shape the curve. What you are listening for is sudden dropouts, one-note booms, or rattles, not perfect evenness.