WringGuide
How to test a phone speaker properly
Most speaker problems are diagnosed wrongly because people test with music. A song has everything in it at once — bass, vocals, cymbals — so a speaker that has lost half its range still sounds like "something is playing". A test tone removes the guesswork: one frequency, one channel, and you either hear it cleanly or you do not.
Step 1: the channel test
Tap Left, then Right, then Both. On headphones you should hear the tone move from ear to ear; if it stays in the middle or one side is missing, the problem is the cable, the plug or a mono setting in accessibility options. On a phone held in landscape, most modern phones play stereo with the earpiece as one channel and the bottom speaker as the other, so a missing side often maps to a blocked grille. On a Bluetooth speaker, check that it is in stereo mode and not paired as a phone headset — headset profiles are mono and low quality.
Step 2: the sweep
Set the volume to about half and press the sweep button. The tone glides from 100 Hz up to 8 kHz over four seconds and back down again. Listen for three things: where the sound starts to be audible at the bottom (a phone speaker usually comes in around 200–300 Hz — that is normal), any point where the tone suddenly gets quieter or disappears, and any point where you hear a buzz or rattle on top of the tone. A clean speaker glides smoothly; a damaged or dirty one has holes and noises.
Step 3: compare
Run the same sweep on the other channel or another device. Ears adapt quickly, so a side-by-side comparison within a few seconds is far more reliable than memory. If you are checking a phone you are about to buy second-hand, do this test in a quiet room with the case off — it takes twenty seconds and catches the most common hidden fault.
What the browser cannot see
A web page talks to the phone through the operating system's stereo output. It cannot address the earpiece and the bottom speaker separately, cannot tell whether the phone is at 20% or 100% volume, and cannot store results. That is why the Wring app tests each speaker on its own, at a controlled level, and keeps a health score so you can tell whether the speaker got worse after the beach or after a drop. The app also includes the fixes — water eject and dust clean — right next to the test, so "the bottom speaker is muffled" becomes a one-tap action rather than a search.
Why 100 Hz to 8 kHz
Phone speakers reproduce almost nothing below 100 Hz, and above 8 kHz differences are hard to judge by ear and unpleasant at volume. The range covers the whole voice band, the fundamental of every note on a piano and the region where dust and grille damage show up as harshness. If you want a single steady frequency instead — to find the exact pitch a case rattles at, or to test a subwoofer — use the tone generator, which goes from 20 Hz to 20 kHz.
Safety
Test tones are steady, so they are more fatiguing than music at the same level. Keep the volume moderate, take headphones off before switching to the sweep, and never hold a phone speaker against your ear while a test is running. Everything on this page is generated on your device with the Web Audio API; there are no recordings, no microphone access and no uploads.