Hear where your headphones stop, by ear rather than by chart
Processed in your browser. Nothing is uploaded. Updated on 24 Oct 2026.Headphones cannot be measured by a laptop microphone in any useful way, because the sound never reaches it. What they can be judged by is your own ear during the sweep: note the moment the bass turns from a tone into a faint rumble, and the moment the treble disappears. Those two points, compared between one pair and another, tell you more than most published specifications do.
The sweep is set to run without the microphone, so you judge the headphones by ear.
Put the headphones on, set a comfortable volume and choose a Sweep length.
Press Run the sweep and watch the Hz readout climb from 20 Hz to 20 kHz.
Note the reading when the bass turns into a rumble and when the treble disappears.
This tool plays a slow logarithmic sweep from 20 Hz to 20 kHz through your speakers, records it back through your microphone, and draws what survived the journey as a curve in third-octave bands, relative to 1 kHz.
A driver a centimetre across cannot move enough air to make low frequencies, so a typical laptop is already falling away by 200 Hz and has essentially nothing below 150 Hz. The bass you hear in music on those speakers is being implied by its harmonics rather than played. Phones are usually worse. A steep fall at the top of the curve, above 8 kHz, is often the microphone rather than the speaker, because many laptop microphones are filtered there by their driver.
Frequency runs left to right on a logarithmic axis, so each octave takes the same width, which is how hearing works. The curve is normalised so 1 kHz sits at 0 dB. The tool reports the points where the response last stands within 3 dB and within 10 dB of the middle of the curve, and the slope above 5 kHz in decibels per octave.
The rest of the article, and all 6 questions about Frequency Response Sweep, are on the Frequency Response Sweep page.
Both, plus the room, multiplied together. A browser has no way to separate them, because that needs a calibrated measurement microphone and either an anechoic chamber or gated measurement. Treat the curve as a comparison between two setups in the same place, never as a specification for a single component.
Small drivers cannot move enough air to produce low frequencies, so a typical laptop speaker is already falling away by 200 Hz and has almost nothing left below 150. Phones are usually worse. The bass you hear in music on those speakers comes from harmonics higher up rather than from the fundamental.
Not by chart, because the sound never reaches the microphone. Use the sweep by ear instead: note where the bass turns into a faint rumble and where the treble vanishes, then compare those two points between one pair and another. Judging headphones that way is more useful than most published specifications.
A logarithmic sweep spends the same amount of time in every octave, so 20 to 40 Hz takes as long as 10 to 20 kHz. Hearing and audio measurement both work that way, which means every part of the range gets an equal number of readings rather than the treble getting almost all of them.
Still stuck? Ask about Frequency Response Sweep and anybody who knows can answer. No account needed.
Same job, other tools: Frequency Generator – Generate a steady test frequency for speakers, headphones or instruments · Sweep Tone Generator – Sweep smoothly between two frequencies over a time you choose · High Frequency Hearing Check – Screen the top tones, 4 kHz and 8 kHz, ear by ear, then test higher with a tone generator · Play Audio Backwards – Hear a recording backwards, then forwards, for the reverse singing challenge · Mic Test – See your voice on a live waveform and hear it played straight back.
On the related tools: Increase Audio Volume – Raise a quiet recording as far as it will go before anything starts to distort.
In the collection Audio Test Tools.