Bluetooth Mic Test for Headsets and AirPods

Why Bluetooth mics sound muffled

Classic Bluetooth splits headphone audio into two profiles: A2DP for music, which sounds good but carries no microphone, and the Hands-Free Profile (HFP) for calls, which carries the microphone but plays back in mono at lower quality. The moment an app opens the headset’s mic, the headset switches to call mode for everything, which is why music and games also go flat when a call starts. So a classic Bluetooth headset mic is always in call mode when you use it; what differs between headsets is how much of your voice that mode carries.

That comes down to the sample rate, because a recording can’t hold anything above half its sample rate:

Microsoft describes the original 8 kHz mode as missing nearly all treble, a little worse than AM radio, and says even the doubled wideband rate is still closer to AM radio than to CD quality.

How to read this page

Connect the headset, click Start microphone test and pick it in the Microphone list. The line under the spectrum reads the mic’s sample rate, and the technical details are open further down. Then say something with plenty of s-sounds, like “she sells sea shells”: those carry the highest frequencies in speech. A wired, USB or built-in mic reaches well past the 8 kHz guide while you talk; a Bluetooth headset usually stops at or just before the 4 kHz (NB), 8 kHz (WB) or 16 kHz (SWB) guide, depending on the mode it runs in, and nothing appears to the right of it. Not every browser reports the sample rate, but the spectrum shows the cut-off in any browser.

Noise suppression starts off here, so the browser doesn’t clear the high-frequency hiss between words and make a full-range mic look cut off. Read the edge while you’re talking either way.

Getting better sound

• Talk into another mic. Set your call app’s microphone to the laptop’s built-in mic or a USB mic and leave the headset as the speaker only: with its own mic closed, it never leaves stereo music mode. On Windows, if the headset shows up twice as an output, choose the stereo one, not the one with Hands-Free in its name.
• LE Audio on Windows 11. It needs Windows 11 version 22H2 or later, drivers from the PC maker that support LE Audio for both the Bluetooth radio and the audio chip, and a headset that supports it. If Settings › Bluetooth & devices › Devices shows Use LE Audio when available, switch it on. Keeping stereo sound while the mic is on also needs Windows 11 version 24H2 with the latest updates and a current Bluetooth audio driver.
• Playing music into a call. Microsoft advises against Bluetooth devices for Teams’ high-fidelity music mode.

AirPods

AirPods on a Windows PC or an Android phone work as an ordinary Bluetooth headset (Apple’s words: you can listen and talk, but not use Siri), so everything above applies. With Apple’s own devices they can carry more in some apps: Apple says a free firmware update in autumn 2024 gave AirPods Pro (2nd generation) 16-bit, 48 kHz audio for voice chat with other players in games, along with Voice Isolation, which removes background noise such as wind using machine learning on the AirPods and the paired iPhone, iPad or Mac. What a game or call app gets can therefore differ from what the browser receives here, so test in the browser you’ll use.

If one AirPod’s mic seems dead, check which bud is set as the microphone (see the questions on this page), and take that bud out of the case.

To hear the difference for yourself, record 5 seconds with the headset mic, then 5 seconds with your laptop mic, and play both back. The mic echo test is a quick way to listen live, and the speaker and headphone test checks the listening side.

How this page is set up

This is the same microphone test as the standard mic test, opened with different settings. You can change any of them once the test is running. Like the standard test, the page remembers only which microphone you picked.