Methodology: How the Sounds Were Chosen

The physics in one paragraph

A speaker makes sound by moving a diaphragm back and forth. Two facts decide whether that movement can push water out. First, for a given volume, a diaphragm travels furthest at low frequencies — excursion rises steeply as frequency falls, which is why bass is something you feel. Second, it cannot travel forever: below a small driver's useful range it mostly just heats up and distorts instead of pumping air. The useful cleaning zone for a phone speaker is therefore the low hundreds of hertz and below — strong, clean cone travel without asking the driver to do something it physically cannot.

Why 165 Hz for water eject

The Water Eject mode centres on 165 Hz because it sits in that sweet spot for typical phone speakers: low enough for large diaphragm travel, high enough that phone drivers reproduce it efficiently instead of wasting it as heat. It is also in the same low range that measurements of the Apple Watch's built-in eject tones cluster around — Apple's Water Lock feature is the existence proof that pulsed low tones eject water from a tiny speaker, and 165 Hz is our implementation of the same principle for phones, chosen from the physics rather than copied from any leaked specification.

The pulses matter as much as the pitch. A steady tone lets a droplet find a stable spot and sit there; short bursts with brief silences keep the surface tension breaking and re-breaking, so droplets walk toward the edge of the grille and out. That is why the water mode breathes — roughly 2.4 seconds on, a pause, repeat — instead of droning.

Where the other modes came from

• Deep Clean Sweep (120–1200 Hz): dust is not held by surface tension the way water is, so a sweep that crosses many resonances shakes loose particles of different sizes and positions.
• Dust Clean (5–12 kHz): high frequencies move very little air but vibrate the mesh itself rapidly — useful for fine, dry particles sitting on the grille surface.
• Earpiece Clean (400–1500 Hz): the earpiece is a smaller driver tuned for voice; its useful travel band sits higher, so its cleaner sweeps the voice range instead of the bass range.
• Mic Area Clean (200–800 Hz): a gentle mid sweep for the bottom edge where the microphone holes and speaker grille sit side by side.
• Deep Bass Pulses (60–120 Hz): the lowest band phone speakers can still usefully move, alternated to maximise pumping for stubborn water — at the cost of being quieter on small phones, which is expected physics, not a fault.

The guidance our care steps are based on

The handling advice across this site (dry first, tap port-down, no heat, no compressed air, no rice, patience before charging) follows the published support guidance of the phone makers themselves — principally Apple's support documentation on liquid damage and drying (including its advice against rice and against inserting objects into ports), Google's Pixel care guidance, and Samsung's Galaxy water-exposure guidance. Where makers differ, we follow the more cautious instruction. The eject concept itself is modelled on Apple Watch Water Lock, the one mainstream implementation of sound-based water ejection.

What sound can and cannot fix — honestly

• Can: push fresh water droplets out of a speaker grille; shake loose dry dust and lint off a mesh; reveal, through test tones, whether a problem is blockage or damage.
• Cannot: repair a torn or worn-out driver; remove sticky grime, earwax deep in earbud mesh, or corrosion; dry water that has already travelled deep inside the phone (only time and air do that); make a speaker louder than its hardware allows.
• We do not claim laboratory success rates or percentages, because we have not run controlled lab trials — and you should be suspicious of any cleaning-sound site that quotes you a precise success figure. What we can say is that the method is the same one a major manufacturer ships in its own product, and that it costs nothing to try before paying for a repair.

Good to know

• If a cleaning sound and a full dry do not restore your speaker, the problem was never blockage — our blown-speaker test helps confirm that before you spend money.
• This page is reviewed when maker guidance changes; see the review line at the top of every page.

Related tools & guides