Blown Speaker Simulator – Turn your browser into a cheap car subwoofer

Have you ever wanted your high-end laptop to sound like a 1998 Honda Civic with a blown-out subwoofer? Probably not, but now you can!

Blown Speaker Simulator is a novelty Chrome extension built to test the absolute limits of Chrome's Manifest V3 and the Web Audio API. It captures your active tab's audio, isolates the low-end frequencies, and applies heavy digital distortion in real-time.

How it works under the hood: Since MV3 service workers don't support AudioContext natively, the extension uses chrome.tabCapture to send the media stream to a persistent Offscreen Document. Down in that layer, a BiquadFilter isolates and boosts the bass (+28dB), and a WaveShaperNode applies real-time clipping without perceptible latency.

I built this entirely with the help of AI, experimenting to see if I could create a complex audio graph without any prior audio engineering background.

-Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/kdapkcfnbmannmioimmcbobjgdicgdeb

-Source Code (GitHub): https://github.com/Endoplazmikmitokondri/blown-speaker-simulator

Pro tip: Turn down your YouTube or Spotify web player volume to 20-30% before clicking "Blow the Speakers!"—the digital gain is extreme and it will be loud.