How the echo test works
Put on headphones and click Start microphone test, then Hear myself. Everything the mic picks up comes back one second later. Say a short sentence, stop, and listen to it come back. Hearing your voice after you’ve finished speaking lets you listen to it on its own, instead of over the sound of your voice inside your head, which is closer to how other people hear you.
Pick 0.5 s echo if you’d rather keep talking and hear yourself trail just behind, or Live to monitor as you speak. The volume slider only changes what you hear, not what the mic sends. The echo carries exactly what web apps receive from this mic with the processing boxes above, so turning noise suppression or auto gain off and on changes what you hear back.
While you listen, the meters, the waveform and the diagnosis keep running, so you can match what you hear with a measurement.
What to listen for
- Muffled, like a phone line: a Bluetooth headset in hands-free (call) mode. The Bluetooth mic test shows it on the spectrum.
- Hiss, hum or room noise in the gaps: background noise. Compare it with and without noise suppression on the noise cancelling mic test.
- Crackle on loud words: clipping. The Clipping counter goes up at the same moment; lower the input volume.
- Your voice fading in and out, or the room surging up between words: auto gain and noise suppression working hard. Untick them one at a time and listen again.
- Distant and hollow: you’re too far from the mic, or the room is echoey. Move to 10–30 cm from a desk mic, or bring a headset boom to the corner of your mouth.
The echo tests built into call apps
- Discord: User Settings › Voice & Video › Mic Test › Let’s Check plays your voice back through your output device. It’s in the desktop app and the browser, not on phones, and if you’re in a voice channel Discord mutes and deafens you until you stop the test.
- Microsoft Teams: Settings and more › Settings › Devices › Make a test call. The Test Call Bot asks you to record a short message, plays it back and then shows a summary. Microsoft deletes the recording right after the call. It’s only in the Teams desktop app for Windows and Mac.
- Zoom: in the desktop app’s audio settings, Test microphone records you, shows the input volume bar and plays the recording back. zoom.us/test starts a test meeting.
- Google Meet: the check before you join shows a mic bar that moves when you speak; Google’s help doesn’t describe a playback.
This page does the same job in any browser, without an account or a meeting, and adds the numbers: level, noise floor, clipping and what they mean. Use Record 10 s when you want a clip to replay or download.
When others hear an echo on your calls
An echo on a call is almost always someone’s speakers feeding back into their own microphone. Zoom lists three causes: someone connected with both computer and phone audio, devices whose speakers are too close to each other, and several computers with audio on in the same room. Zoom puts it this way: if you hear an echo, a device is channelling your audio back. So when you hear yourself, the cause is at the other end, and when the others hear themselves, look at your own setup: headphones, echo cancellation on and one device per room.
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.
| Setting | This page | Standard mic test |
|---|---|---|
| Hear yourself | 1 s echo, right under the result | Live (no delay) |