Echo test
When someone on a call says they can hear themselves, the cause is almost never their equipment — it is yours. Your speakers are playing their voice, your microphone is picking it up, and it is being sent straight back. This plays a tone through your speakers and measures how much of it your microphone hears.
- Room without the tone—
- Tone picked up by the microphone—
- Tone picked up by the microphone—
Did the microphone pick up the tone?
Running it
Take your headphones off and let the sound come out of your speakers — that is the point of the test. The test measures your room for two and a half seconds, then plays a 660 Hz tone through your speakers for the same length of time and measures again. If the second number is more than about eight decibels above the first, your microphone is hearing your speakers.
660 Hz is used because every laptop speaker reproduces it and every microphone hears it, so a quiet result means the path is quiet rather than that the tone was inaudible.
What to do about it, in order
Use headphones. This ends the problem completely and permanently, and nothing else does. Any headphones. If you are on calls regularly and people mention echo, this is the entire answer.
Turn the speaker volume down. Echo scales with output. Often two or three notches is the difference between a canceller coping easily and failing.
Move the microphone out of the line of the speakers. Behind them, or beside them, rather than in front. A directional microphone pointed away from the speakers picks up far less.
Separate them. A laptop with speakers and microphone a few centimetres apart is the worst case there is, and it is also the most common setup on a call.
Stop the laptop resonating. If the speakers are in the same shell as the microphone, sound travels through the case as well as the air. Something soft underneath helps more than it sounds like it should.
Windows 11
- Echo cancellation lives in two places and both matter: Windows applies its own under Settings → System → Sound → your input device → Audio enhancements, and the calling application applies another. Two cancellers in series can interfere with each other.
- Stereo Mix, if it is enabled as an input, sends your own output back as microphone input — which is not acoustic echo at all but produces the same complaint, at full volume and with no room noise. Settings → System → Sound → Input; if a device called Stereo Mix or “What U Hear” is selected, that is the fault.
- Some conferencing applications enable exclusive mode on the microphone, which can disable the Windows canceller without saying so.
macOS
- macOS applies its own echo cancellation to microphone input for applications that ask for it, which is most of them. It is not a setting you can see, which is why an acoustic test is more useful than looking for a switch.
- Do not select an aggregate or loopback device as your input unless you built it deliberately. Software like Loopback or BlackHole can route system output into a virtual input, which produces perfect, undeniable echo.
- On a MacBook, the speakers fire toward the microphone array. It is a well-designed worst case, and headphones remain the only complete fix.
When it is not you
If this test is clean and people still hear themselves, the echo is being produced by another participant and reflected by the platform. The person to test is whoever is on speakers — and this page is the thing to send them.
Common questions
Why does the test tell me to take my headphones off?
Because the fault being looked for is a path from your speakers to your microphone, and headphones remove that path. With headphones on, the test would correctly report no echo and tell you nothing about how you sound on speakers.
Why does the test disable echo cancellation?
Because echo cancellation is designed to remove exactly what is being measured. With it on, the browser would subtract the tone and the test would find nothing. Turning it off shows the acoustic reality underneath, which is what determines how hard the canceller has to work and how often it fails.
My calls have echo cancellation. Why does this matter?
Because cancellers are good, not perfect. They model the path from your speaker to your microphone and subtract it, and that model breaks whenever the path changes — when you move the laptop, when the volume changes, when someone talks over someone. The less echo there is to cancel, the less often it fails. A canceller working hard is also what causes that clipped, one-person-at-a-time feeling on calls.
Can this test measure the delay of the echo?
No, and a browser test that claims to should be treated carefully. What is measured here is whether the tone appears in the microphone at all, comparing the level with and without it. That answers the question people actually have.
Nobody hears an echo but calls still sound clipped. Is that related?
Very likely yes. That clipping is usually the canceller working: while it thinks the far end is speaking, it suppresses your microphone to avoid sending sound back. A strong speaker-to-microphone path makes it act more often and more aggressively. Reducing the echo tends to fix the clipping as well.