For podcasters and anyone with a mic
Read four sentences out loud. In ten seconds RoomTone measures how much of your room is landing in your recordings — and what it takes to get it out.
Measure my room — 10 secondsRuns in your browser with the mic you already own. No test tone, no calibration, no signup. Nothing is uploaded.
Same clap. Two rooms. Turn your volume up.
Both rooms are synthesised, and the difference is only reverberation time. Your microphone hears that difference far more clearly than you do.
Before you upgrade anything
Your voice reaches the microphone twice. Once directly, then again a few milliseconds later, off a wall, a window, a desk, a bare floor. Your ears are extremely good at ignoring those reflections. A microphone is not — it records them at full strength.
That is why a room that sounds completely normal to sit in can sound hollow and distant the moment it is recorded, and why the next microphone up so often disappoints. A more sensitive mic in the same room captures the same reflections in more detail.
Two or three panels at the first reflection points, something soft behind the mic, and a rug on a hard floor will move most rooms into broadcast range for less than the cost of the upgrade you were considering. The hard part is knowing which of those your room actually needs — which is a measurement, and takes ten seconds.
How it works
Before any number means anything, play the same sound in an untreated room and a treated one. That is the difference your listeners hear, and it takes one click and no microphone permission.
Sit where you record and read four sentences out loud. We recover your reverberation time from the gaps between your words — no test tone, no measurement mic, no calibration file — and separate what is the room from what is your levels or your noise floor.
Find out how many panels, or what size rug, closes the gap between your number and 0.3 seconds — and what a smaller budget would get you instead, because almost nobody buys all the way to a target.
What comes back
Spoken word wants roughly 0.3 seconds or less. Broadcast booths sit nearer 0.2. An untreated spare bedroom usually lands between 0.4 and 0.6. Now you know which one you are recording in.
Rough-sounding audio has three usual causes and people consistently misdiagnose it as a fourth — the microphone. We score the room, the noise floor and the recording level separately, so you spend money on the right one.
How many panels reach your target, what half that many would get you, and which products cannot reach it at all. Every figure traces back to a published absorption coefficient you can check yourself.
Being honest about it
We are not really competing with another acoustics site. We are competing with six other things you could do about this today, four of which are free. Here they are, including the ones that work.
The most common choice, and the one this page is really competing with. Audio quality is the most cited reason listeners quit a show.
A more detailed microphone in an untreated room captures the reflections more accurately. This is the upgrade that disappoints people.
Thin foam does very little below about 500 Hz, which is where a voice picks up the boxiness. The coefficients are on this site — check them.
Ten confident, contradictory opinions and no measurement. Often good advice buried in advice for a different room.
Genuinely better instruments than ours. Built for people mixing records, not people talking into a mic before work.
A repair, not a fix. You pay it every episode, it artifacts on the hard cases, and it cannot rescue a guest recorded in a worse room than yours.
You still have to buy something. But you will know whether the problem is the room at all, how far off you are, and what closes the gap — before you spend anything.
Why you should believe the number
Reverberation time is normally measured by popping a balloon or playing a sweep. We instead recover it blind, from the decay in the short gaps between ordinary words, using the maximum-likelihood estimator described by Ratnam and colleagues in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America in 2003. That is the whole reason this needs no test signal and no calibration.
Against speech mixed with rooms of known reverberation time it lands within about 0.03–0.07 seconds on a clean recording. It cannot resolve below roughly 0.2 seconds, so a well-treated booth is reported as “under 0.25s” rather than given a figure. And background noise hides the tail of the decay, which pushes the estimate up — so when your noise floor is high we say the number is probably an overestimate and mark it low confidence.
No calculator here invents an absorption number. Ninety materials across six octave bands, published on this site, are what the panel and rug calculators run on. If you disagree with a recommendation you can find the row it came from.
The recording is analysed in your browser and is never uploaded, stored or sent anywhere. There is no account and no upload endpoint. You can pull your network connection and the sound check still works — which is the only version of that claim worth making.
Free tools
In the order you would use them: hear the difference, measure your room, then work out what closing the gap costs.
What your room is doing to your voice
Open →Read four sentences, get your number
Open →uses your micWhat the room sounds like when you stop talking
Open →uses your micHow many panels reach 0.3 seconds
Open →The cheapest large surface you can treat
Open →Predict a room before you move into it
Open →90 materials, measured
Open →Trade-offs
Nothing here will help with the neighbour's dog, the road, or the flatmate on a call next door. That is soundproofing — mass and sealed gaps, a construction problem, and largely not something you can do to a room you rent. We work on how your voice sounds inside the room. If your problem is noise getting in, the noise meter will confirm it and then we are the wrong site.
If you own a calibrated microphone and know what Room EQ Wizard is, you have better instruments than these and you should use them. This is for the ninety seconds before you hit record, with the mic already in front of you. We also do not yet do speaker and monitor measurement, which is the other thing REW is for.
We do not de-reverb. Removing a room from a finished recording is an unsolved problem in the general case, and the tools that attempt it charge you every month and audibly struggle on the hard cases. Treating the room is a thing you do once. That is the trade we are offering.
You already know the words for it
Nobody describes this problem in seconds of reverberation time. They describe it the way it sounds on playback — and every one of those descriptions maps onto something measurable, which is what turns a complaint into a fix list.
“It sounds like I'm talking from the other side of the room, even though the mic is six inches away.”
“My guest sounds fine and I sound like I'm in a stairwell.”
“I bought a better mic and it somehow sounds worse.”
Written as the language people use, not as customer quotes. We have not put words in anyone's mouth.
The obvious objections
For this it can. We are measuring how long sound takes to decay, which is a property of time, not of level — so it does not need a calibrated microphone the way a frequency-response measurement would. That is the trade that makes this possible without any equipment, and it is also why we publish the error bars rather than claiming lab accuracy.
Use them — they are good, and on a recording that already exists they are the only option. But they are a repair you pay for every episode, they leave artifacts on heavily reverberant material, and they cannot rescue a guest who recorded in a worse room than yours. A rug and three panels is a thing you do once.
That is the most common story we hear, and it is not your fault. Thin foam absorbs well at high frequencies and very little below roughly 500 Hz, which is where a voice picks up that boxy quality. Thickness and air gap matter far more than surface area. The coefficient tables show the difference plainly.
The tools are free and there is no account. We earn a commission if you buy a product through one of our links, and we say so at the point where it applies. That is the entire model. It is also why the calculators show you what a cheaper option gets you rather than only the one that reaches the target.
Ten seconds, in this browser, before you buy anything else.
Measure my room — 10 seconds