Re: Your favorite measurement system [message #63959 is a reply to message #25137] |
Tue, 31 August 2010 14:51 |
PR Audio
Messages: 23 Registered: July 2009 Location: Southern IL / Western KY
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As far as measurement systems go, I have been using LMS "forever" (at the time I bought it, I was told my board was the last board of the 1st 100 made, or something to that effect. Chris Strahm says they've sold 55,000 of them. Pretty amazing!)
LinearX is coming out with a new system, the LX-500, which will be (it looks like) LMS on steroids, and USB based. A company I do consulting work for is likely going to have me try it out at some point - maybe I can report back then.
S&L's "Woofer Tester Pro" is very good and very reasonably priced. Many cool features - it does a LOT more than test woofers - that is for sure. I'll be trying it on Win7 very soon... Their "Speaker Tester" is also an excellent choice, if you do not need to do large signal T-S testing.
Praxis (by their own information) requires workarounds to workarounds to workarounds to run on Vista or Win7. I have not had much luck with that, or the time to figure it out!
LEAP 5 is not really a measurement system, of course. It's great, but Leap 5 (complete) has 1304 pages of user manual. I believe this is what's called a serious learning curve.
Also I would note that Chris Strahm of LinearX pretty well pooh-hoos all the PC-sound-card based systems as being nowhere near "instrumentation quality" due to the sound cards themselves. Of course, they compete with him. I'm inclined to think that, for the money, if your budget is tight, having a really good, stable mic, and having a good setup / taking care in measurements (and crosschecking), makes more difference than whether you have instrumentation quality electronics in the measuring system. That's depending on what you are trying to do, of course.
FWIW, S&L's systems essentially use a custom dedicated purpose sound card of their own design & mfgr., and from what I've seen in my usage, it's pretty good. (Keith, if I have not described this correctly, set me straight!)
Come visit!
www.praudio.com/site/
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