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Bass Test

Find where your bass really stops. Seven fixed tones from 20 to 100 Hz plus a slow low-end sweep - the lowest one you can hear cleanly is your gear's true floor.

⚠ Start at low volume. Sustained low tones at high level can bottom out subwoofers and overheat small drivers.

Reading your results

Tone is silent: below your gear's range - normal for 20-40 Hz on anything without a subwoofer. Tone sounds higher-pitched than the next one up: you are hearing harmonic distortion, not the fundamental. Buzzing or rattling: something loose - the driver, the grille, or the furniture. Loud at one spot in the sweep, dead at another: room modes - a property of the room, not the speaker.

Go deeper: Subwoofer Test · Bass Tone Generator · Room Mode Calculator · Fix My Speaker · Sound Test

Bass Test FAQ

What bass should my gear reproduce?

Rough expectations: laptop speakers give out around 150-200 Hz; small Bluetooth speakers around 80-100 Hz; decent bookshelf speakers reach 50-60 Hz; good over-ear headphones reproduce 20-30 Hz (quietly but audibly); a real subwoofer should produce clean output at 25-30 Hz and many reach 20. If a tone two steps above your gear's rating is silent, check volume and placement before blaming the hardware.

I hear something on the 20 Hz tone through small speakers - how?

What you hear is almost certainly harmonic distortion, not 20 Hz. When a small driver is pushed below its range it produces overtones at 40, 60, 80 Hz that your brain accepts as "a low note". A quick check: if the 20 Hz "tone" sounds similar in pitch to the 40 Hz one, you are hearing the distortion, not the fundamental.

Why does the bass get louder and quieter as I move around the room?

Room modes: low-frequency waves are meters long and reflect between parallel walls, creating spots where the wave stacks up (boomy) and spots where it cancels (dead). This is a room property, not a speaker fault. Find your problem frequencies with the room mode calculator, and test from your actual listening position.

How loud should I play these tones?

Start around a quarter volume and raise it gradually. Low frequencies feel quieter than they measure - equal-loudness curves mean 40 Hz needs far more energy than 1 kHz to sound equally loud - so it is easy to drive a small speaker into distortion or bottom out a subwoofer without realizing. Rattling grilles and buzzing panels mean back off.

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