DeviceBenchFree online surround sound test
Surround sound test that addresses one channel at a time
Every speaker position gets its own burst on its own numbered output — front left is channel 0, center is channel 2, the subwoofer is channel 3 — and you mark whether it arrived from the speaker the diagram points at, which is how a rear channel in the wrong socket gives itself away. Before anything plays, the page reads how many discrete outputs the browser is willing to give it, and that number is the honest limit of the whole exercise: when it comes back as two, the surround positions are switched off rather than faked, because a request for a channel your device does not have collapses onto one it does and would report a rear speaker that never played.
- 100% free
- No signup
- 5.1 and 7.1
- Channels 0-7
- Says when it cannot
The output has not been opened yet.
A browser will not say how many channels it can address until the page has been clicked once, so there is no number to show here rather than a zero.
Front left
Center
Front right
Subwoofer (LFE)
Surround left
Surround right
Marking a position: ✓ heard from that speaker, ≠ heard from another one, — nothing at all. The LFE step is a 45 Hz tone rather than noise, because a subwoofer is fed nothing above about 120 Hz and pink noise would prove only that the crossover works.
The page sends uncompressed samples to numbered outputs. It cannot produce a Dolby or DTS bitstream, so a receiver that only lights its surround decoder for encoded material will show this as multichannel PCM.
How to check a 5.1 or 7.1 setup
Read the channel count, walk the layout, then fix what came from the wrong place.
Open the output first and read the channel count
Nothing plays until the browser has been asked how many discrete outputs it can address, because that number decides whether the rest of the page means anything. Two is what almost every laptop, USB headset and Bluetooth device reports. Six or eight appears only when the output device itself has been configured for surround in the operating system, or when a receiver is connected over HDMI and the machine has been told it is a multichannel endpoint.
Walk the positions in order and mark each one
The automatic walk moves through the layout one position every 2.6 seconds, in channel order, so you always know which speaker is supposed to be making the noise. Mark each with the tick if it came from the right place, the not-equals sign if it came from somewhere else, and the dash if nothing arrived. Marking as you go matters more than it sounds: two positions that both play from the same speaker are easy to miss when you are trying to remember four bursts at the end.
Fix the wrong ones at the amplifier, not in software
A burst that arrives from the wrong speaker is almost always a cable in the wrong socket, because the channel numbers themselves are assigned before the sound leaves the computer — if the numbering were wrong, every position would be wrong together. Swap the two cables at the receiver rather than remapping anything, then run the walk again. A position that produced nothing is the other case, and the receiver's own speaker configuration menu is where to look before the wiring.
Technical specifications
| The limit this page states up front | AudioContext.destination.maxChannelCount — 2 on almost every laptop and headset, and the positions above it are disabled rather than approximated |
|---|---|
| Channel order | 0 front left, 1 front right, 2 center, 3 LFE, 4 surround left, 5 surround right, 6 back left, 7 back right |
| How a channel is addressed | A ChannelMergerNode into a destination switched to discrete interpretation and sized to the maximum the device reports |
| Burst per position | 2 s of pink noise at 25% of full scale |
| LFE step | A 45 Hz sine held for 2.5 s, because a subwoofer is fed nothing above roughly 120 Hz |
| Automatic walk | One position every 2.6 s, in channel order, skipping anything the device cannot address |
| Encoded formats | None. A browser emits PCM to numbered outputs and has no way to produce a Dolby or DTS bitstream |
| What a silent channel does not prove | A decoder set to none in the receiver mutes a channel just as completely as a disconnected cable |
Frequently asked questions
The page says two channels but I own a 5.1 system. What is going on?
The browser can only address what the current output device exposes, and by default most of them expose a stereo endpoint even when six speakers are attached. Windows keeps that setting per device in the sound control panel, under the speaker setup wizard; macOS keeps it in Audio MIDI Setup, under Configure Speakers; and both of them reset it when the device is re-detected. Until the endpoint itself reports six or eight channels, the browser genuinely has nowhere to send a rear channel.
Why does the page refuse to play the surround positions instead of just playing them?
Because a request for a channel the device does not have is not spread across your speakers — it lands on the highest channel that does exist. Asking for the surround left output on a two-channel device puts the burst in your right speaker, which looks exactly like a working test and would tell you a rear speaker is fine when it was never sent anything. Refusing is the only answer that is not a lie, so the positions past the limit are drawn as unavailable.
My rear speakers are playing the front channels. Where is that coming from?
Two places, and this test separates them. If the walk shows front left arriving from a rear speaker, the cables are in the wrong sockets. If every position arrives from every speaker at once, nothing is miswired: the receiver is running an upmix mode — names vary, Dolby Surround, DTS Neural:X, All Channel Stereo, Multi-Ch In — that deliberately spreads two channels across everything. Switch the receiver to its direct or native mode before you conclude anything about wiring.
The subwoofer stayed silent on the LFE step. Is it dead?
Check the crossover setting first, because the LFE channel is the one most often turned off by accident. A receiver set to no subwoofer redirects that channel into the front speakers and mutes the output entirely, and the 45 Hz tone used here is below what most small front speakers reproduce, so the result is silence with nothing broken. After that comes the subwoofer's own gain and its auto-standby, which can take several seconds to wake on a short burst and will sleep through a test made only of short bursts.
Does this test Dolby Atmos or the height speakers?
No, and no web page can. Everything here is uncompressed PCM sent to numbered outputs, which is the only thing a browser is able to produce — there is no interface anywhere in the web platform for emitting an encoded Dolby or DTS bitstream, and height channels in Atmos are not fixed outputs at all but objects positioned by the decoder at playback time. If your receiver only lights its surround decoder for encoded material, it will show this test as multichannel PCM, which is correct.
Should the center channel sound quieter than the front pair?
It should sound the same, and if it does not, the receiver's per-channel trim is the place to fix it rather than this page. Calibration in a home system sets every channel to the same level at the listening position, traditionally 75 dB from the receiver's internal test noise, precisely so that a burst moving around the layout does not change loudness as it goes. A center that is audibly quieter than the fronts on this walk is either trimmed down or further away than the automatic setup measured.
My stereo pages sound different after running this. Did the test change something?
Yes, and reloading any page on the site puts it back. Addressing an individual output requires switching the browser's destination into discrete mode, where channel one goes to output one and nothing is folded together, and that setting stays on the shared audio engine for the rest of the session rather than being flipped back between bursts. On a system that normally spreads stereo across all six speakers, that difference is audible. A reload builds a fresh engine with the default behavior.
About channel numbering and what a browser can send
Multichannel audio is not really a layout, it is an ordered list, and the order is the same everywhere for a reason. The WAVE extensible format, the ITU recommendation that standardized the 5.1 arrangement and the discrete layouts in the web audio specification all agree: channel 0 is front left, 1 is front right, 2 is center, 3 is the low frequency effects channel, and 4 and 5 are the surround pair, with 6 and 7 added behind you for 7.1. A file, a decoder and a sound card can therefore hand each other six streams with no metadata at all and still agree on which is which. Everything that goes wrong in a home system goes wrong after that point, in the physical sockets, which is exactly why a test that addresses the numbers one at a time finds it.
The number that decides whether any of this is possible from a web page is maxChannelCount on the audio destination, and on most machines it is two. That is not the browser being cautious — it is the output endpoint the operating system has published. A laptop’s built-in output is a stereo device; a USB headset is a stereo device; a Bluetooth link is a stereo device by protocol. Six or eight appear only when the endpoint itself has been configured for surround, which on Windows means the speaker setup wizard in the sound control panel and on macOS means Configure Speakers in Audio MIDI Setup, and in both cases the setting belongs to the device rather than to the application. Until that changes, the browser has nowhere to put a rear channel, and any page that claims to have tested one is playing it out of a front speaker.
There is a second limit worth knowing before you interpret a result: a browser sends uncompressed samples, never an encoded bitstream. A receiver connected over optical or HDMI can decode Dolby Digital or DTS when it is handed one, but no web platform interface exists for producing such a stream, so a page can only address the discrete channels the operating system has already opened. That is enough to prove which socket carries which channel, which is what people come here for, and not enough to test a decoder. For anything narrower, the neighboring pages are more direct: whether sound is being produced at all belongs to the sound test, the front pair on its own — including the polarity check that catches a box wired backwards — is the speaker test, and the same questions asked of two drivers on your head are the headphone test. A steady tone for chasing a rattle in a cabinet comes from the tone generator, and how deep the subwoofer actually reaches is the bass test.
What leaves this page
Every number on this page is worked out by JavaScript running in the tab you are reading it in. Nothing you type, paste or open is uploaded, logged or kept, which is also why the tools carry on working after you disconnect from the network.
The bursts are generated in the tab and addressed to output numbers; nothing about your speaker layout, your receiver or the marks you make on the diagram is transmitted or stored. The channel count on the panel is asked of the audio engine each time a burst starts, and nothing keeps it once the tab closes.