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I have an idea of testing the microphone quality by playing sound of various frequency in the speaker and compare it with the recorded sound. It should be able to tell you the SNR at different frequency band. I wonder if there is already such program, or any other software based microphone testing method.

Any comment on the idea is also appreciated. I think the biggest problem is that when the result is poor, it doesn't tell whether the speaker is poor or microphone is.

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I know there is hardware to do it. Not sure about software. You would also need to worry about the D/A conversion of your sound card. Most low-end cards do not perform equally well across the entire audio spectrum. You would really need to spend a lot of effort to calibrating your system, before you could even start testing mics. – Zoredache Jun 13 '11 at 7:28
It might be more interesting to compare the signal of two mics listening to the same audio source at the same time. Play some white noise with both mics recording, and then look at some of the graphs in audacity. By having two mics, a reference and a test you should be able to factor out almost everything except the mic by looking for differences. – Zoredache Jun 13 '11 at 7:32
Thanks Zoredache. Comparing two mics or two speakers is very interesting indeed. The defect of a sound input or output device can be modeled as band filter, which can be added or subtracted easily. – Wu Yongzheng Jun 15 '11 at 6:09
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Rightmark have a pretty sweet audio path test program called RightMark Audio Analyser and in all honestly it is a pretty full featured test package and will give you SNR, THD (total harmonic distortion) and a number of other tests.

Once the tests are run it will even give you a nice HTML page (complete with graphs) with all the results on it.

One thing you can do is to create a simple feedback cable so you can pass your soundcard output straight to the input (which will allow you to test your soundcard A/D and D/A converters) so that you have something to compare it to when you plug in your microphone and speakers.

There is both a free version and a paid for "PRO" version on the Rightmark site.

http://audio.rightmark.org/

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Thanks. I think Rightmark is used to test sound card (A/D signal conversion) instead of the acoustic device (send/capture electrical signal to/from the air). I'm more interested in the later. – Wu Yongzheng Jun 15 '11 at 6:17
Yes Rightmark can be used to test the soundcard specifically, but (as I mentioned) you can use it to effectively test any audio path, for example out of a set of speakers and into a microphone. It really is just an audio test tool rather than just a soundcard test tool. The reason I suggested testing the soundcard using a loopback cable first was so that you have a baseline (soundcard only) set of results to compare with a test through speaker and microphone... Did you actually try using it? – Mokubai Jun 15 '11 at 7:33
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