Most speaker cleaning tools publish frequency figures with nothing behind them. Ours are read directly from the tool’s audio configuration, and you can check them yourself.
What each cleaning mode actually plays
| Mode | Frequency band | Relative volume | Pulse rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Water Eject | 150–220 Hz | 0.50 | 6 per second |
| Deep Vibration | 120–180 Hz | 0.55 | 4 per second |
| Gentle Clean | 180–250 Hz | 0.32 | 7 per second |
All three alternate between a low and high point within their band rather than holding a single steady tone. Deep Vibration sits lowest and strongest with the slowest pulse. Gentle Clean sits highest, is noticeably quieter, and flutters fastest — which is why it suits loose dust rather than trapped water.
What the sound test plays
| Test | What it plays |
|---|---|
| Left / Right / Both | 440 Hz tone, panned to one channel or centred |
| Bass | Sweep from 150 Hz to 400 Hz |
| Treble | Sweep from 2,000 Hz to 8,000 Hz |
| Voice Range | Sweep from 300 Hz to 3,400 Hz |
| Distortion | Sweep from 500 Hz to 2,000 Hz |
Sweeps rather than fixed tones, because a rattle or dropout happens at one specific frequency and a single tone walks straight past it.
Why these ranges
Phone speakers are small drivers in small enclosures. They roll off sharply below roughly 300–400 Hz, so a test sweeping down to 20 Hz would produce near silence on a perfectly healthy speaker and suggest a fault that is not there. Our bass test stays inside what a phone can actually reproduce.
At the other end, hearing above about 15 kHz declines sharply with age. A treble test reaching 16 kHz would test your ears rather than your speaker. Ours stops at 8 kHz, which is audible to most people and less fatiguing at volume.
How to verify this yourself
The tool runs entirely in your browser using the Web Audio API. Open your browser’s developer tools on our homepage, look at the loaded script for this site’s speaker tool, and search for TEST_TONES and the mode configuration. The numbers in the tables above are those values.
What we have not tested
We have not run controlled trials measuring how much water a given mode removes from a given handset. We have no laboratory, no measurement rig, and no sample size worth quoting. The frequency ranges were chosen during development by trying them on real Android and iPhone handsets and keeping what produced the strongest audible vibration.
That is the honest description of the work. It is why we publish specifications rather than success rates — the first we can verify, the second we cannot.
What the tool cannot do
It does not repair physical damage, corrosion, or water that has reached inside the device. It cannot clean the earpiece — browsers cannot route audio to that speaker, so any tool claiming to do so is playing sound through the wrong one. For saltwater exposure, submersion, or visible damage, power the phone off and see a qualified technician.
Last reviewed: July 2026. Corrections to these figures are logged on our corrections page. Our wider standards are set out in our editorial policy.