About MicTest.live

Why we built this

Search for a microphone test and you find pages that show a bar moving up and down. That confirms the device is alive. It does not tell you whether your level is too low, whether you are clipping, how loud your room is, or what you actually sound like to the person on the other end — which are the things people actually want to know.

So we built tools that answer those questions. The microphone test shows the level in decibels with peak and average tracking, draws the waveform and the frequency spectrum, reads the device's real settings out of the browser, lets you toggle the three processing filters to hear their effect, and records five seconds so you can listen back. Then it gives you a plain-English verdict about what to change.

Everything runs on your device

This is not a policy we chose to adopt; it is how the tools are built. Your browser hands the microphone or camera stream directly to the page, the page analyses it with the Web Audio API and the canvas element, and the results are displayed. There is no upload step because there is no server that receives media. Close the tab and the stream ends and the recording is gone.

You can verify this yourself. Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the network tab, and run any test on this site. You will see the page load and then nothing further — no media requests, no uploads, no telemetry carrying your audio.

What we cover

Nine tools at present: microphone, webcam, speakers, headphones, keyboard, mouse, click speed, double-click detection and screen pixels. Alongside them are eight troubleshooting guides for the platforms and applications where microphone problems most often appear, and a set of longer guides explaining the settings and trade-offs behind the tools.

The troubleshooting guides are ordered by how often each fix turns out to be the answer, not by how technically interesting it is. That is why they start with checking for a physical mute switch rather than with reinstalling drivers.

What we do not do

We do not publish equipment rankings, "best microphone" lists or affiliate links. Those pages exist in abundance and their incentives are not aligned with giving you accurate advice. Where a specific product is named in our guides it is as an example of a category — a dynamic microphone, a multi-pattern condenser — rather than a recommendation to buy that model.

We also do not require an account for anything. There is nothing to sign up for and no email to give us.

Accuracy and corrections

Settings paths change when operating systems update, and a guide that was correct last year can send you to a menu that no longer exists. If you find a step that does not match what you see on screen, tell us through the contact page and include the version you are running. Correction reports get priority over everything else in the inbox, because a wrong instruction is worse than no instruction.