The misdiagnosis page
Hearing your own voice on calls: echo, or sidetone?
Half the people googling "echo on my calls" don't have echo. They hear themselves — constantly, faintly, in their own headset — and every echo guide they try fails, because what they have is sidetone: a deliberate feature, or a monitoring setting, feeding their own mic back to their own ears. The two problems sound like cousins and have completely different fixes. One test separates them.
The delay test: tap your mic once, sharply. Hear the tap in your ears instantly, as if the mic were wired to your headphones? That's sidetone/monitoring — keep reading. Hear it come back a beat later, doubled? That's genuine echo — your tap made a round trip through the call — and your page is the echo diagnostic. Bonus check: sidetone persists even when you're alone in a meeting; echo needs another participant's device to bounce off.
What sidetone actually is (and why it's on on purpose)
Sidetone is your own voice, picked up by your mic and played into your own ears with near-zero delay. Telephones have done it for over a century, deliberately: with your ears covered, hearing nothing of yourself makes you feel disconnected and — reliably — makes you talk louder and louder. A little self-feed keeps your voice calibrated. Headsets inherited the feature; many implement it in hardware, some expose a slider, and phone systems bake it in.
So the goal usually isn't zero sidetone — people who get it removed often start shouting — it's the right amount, quiet enough to ignore, present enough to keep your voice level sane. If yours is loud, delayed-feeling, or appeared out of nowhere, something in the chain changed, and it's fixable.
Where the self-feed comes from
- The headset itself. Many communication headsets ship sidetone on by default, adjustable in the vendor's companion app or (on some) a physical control. If the tap-test tone survives unplugging from the call app entirely, it's this layer.
- OS-level monitoring. Windows has a per-device "listen to this device" checkbox that pipes a mic straight to an output — enabled once for a mic test and forgotten, it produces exactly this complaint. macOS equivalents come via audio utilities rather than a stock toggle.
- App-level monitoring. Recording tools, streaming software, and some call apps offer "monitor input." Great when chosen, baffling when a setting migration turns it on.
- Bluetooth mode quirks. Some wireless headsets route mic audio differently in call mode vs media mode; a reconnect mid-day can flip modes and suddenly you hear yourself. Reconnecting (or toggling the device's call profile) resets it.
Work the list top to bottom with the tap test after each change and you'll land on the layer in a few minutes. If no layer admits to it and the sound is genuinely delayed, you were in the echo case all along: someone's speakers are feeding a mic somewhere on your calls, and the culprit hunt or a cancellation layer is the path.
The in-between case: "echoey" sidetone
One configuration confuses everyone: monitoring routed through software adds a few dozen milliseconds of processing delay — too short to hear as a separate copy, long enough to make your voice feel smeared, like talking in a tiled hallway. It fails the "instant" half of the tap test but doesn't sound like classic call echo either. The tell: it happens even with no call running. Fix: use the headset's hardware sidetone if it has one and disable software monitoring, or turn monitoring off entirely and see whether you actually miss it.
And the reverse trap: if what you hear is a delayed copy of yourself only when others are on the call, no sidetone setting on your machine will ever fix it, because the copy is being made on their end. That's the round-trip case — the rule and the fix are here.
Quick answers
Is hearing myself a sign my mic is working at least?
It proves the mic captures audio, nothing more. Sidetone is a local loop — it says nothing about what the far side receives. Judge your call quality by asking the far side, not by your own monitor feed.
Should I turn sidetone off completely?
Try before you commit: most people un-learn noticing moderate sidetone within a day, and removing it entirely tends to raise your speaking volume. Lower it first; kill it only if it still bothers you.
Why do I only hear myself on one particular app?
Then it's that app's input monitoring, not your headset — check its audio settings for a monitor/loopback toggle. App-level monitoring stacks on top of hardware sidetone, which is why one app can feel twice as loud.