Headphone CheckAbout Headphone Check
Headphone Check answers one practical question: do my headphones work properly? It plays the sounds that reveal a problem, tells you what you should hear, and points you to the fix when something is off. No sign-up, no microphone access, nothing to install.
Who we are
We are two people, Nadya Yashchuk and Ivan Lukichev, and we do everything ourselves: design, the audio code, the articles and support.
Nadya is a software developer and the publisher: the site and the Headphone Sound Check app are officially published by her sole proprietorship registered in Austria, with the formal details in the Impressum. Ivan builds the web side and writes the guides: the test engine on this site, the pages and the troubleshooting articles. He makes web tools, mobile apps and games; more of his work is at lukichev.biz and on LinkedIn.
What we make
- The online headphone test, with a guided six-step check and a pass/fail result.
- Separate tests for left and right channels, bass, the full frequency range and 7.1 surround.
- The Headphone Sound Check app for iPhone and Android, which adds spatial audio, microphone tests and a shareable report.
- Troubleshooting guides such as one earbud not working.
How the tests work
Every sound is generated in your browser with the Web Audio API, so nothing is downloaded and the tests start instantly. Tones are sine or triangle waves with soft fades so they never click. Channel tests route the signal to one side with a stereo panner; the polarity test inverts one channel; the sweeps are logarithmic so each octave takes the same time; the surround test places noise bursts around your head with the browser's head-related transfer function (HRTF), and on a multichannel output it addresses each speaker directly.
What we are honest about
These are listening tests, not lab measurements. What you hear depends on the headphones, the connection, your device's settings and your ears, so the tests are best at finding clear faults: a dead side, swapped channels, a rattle, a missing range. They are not a hearing test and give no medical information.
Our other projects
Headphone Check grew out of pickheadphones.com, where the first versions of these tests appeared. Our sound meter lives at HowLoud, a free online decibel meter. Among our other tools are HTTP Tools, a set of quick web utilities, and PickWinner, a fair random picker for giveaways.
Say hello
Found a bug, have a headphone problem we do not cover, or want a new test? Write to contact@nadzeyayashchuk.com. We read everything.