E-mu 0202 + audiotester

[dave slagle]

Can anybody suggest a better combo for a simple PC measurement setup.

The only two requirements for me are USB/Firewire and a 192 sample rate since I need to use it with a laptop and want to do automated frequency sweeps out to 96Khz.

dave

[Gordy]

I was recently looking for a similar thing, and the best specification for the money seems to be the EMU 0404.

http://www.emu.com/products/product....Specifications


Both Audiotester and ARTA software get the approval of many here.

[Conrad Hoffman]

I use an 0202 with Visual Analyzer for various tests at home and at work. No doubt you can get something better, but it does a nice job for the money. You can run different programs for input and output, say the generator from Visual Analyzer and record with Audacity. Even though there's no explicit option for it, you can also play wav files and analyze them using Visual Analyzer.

[Pan]

EMU 0404-USB and ARTA gets my vote but obviously it depends on what exactly you'r going to measure. The phantom powered mic inputs is nice but if you never do acoustic stuff obviously those are superfluous.

Also the slightly better performance of the 0404 maybe is not needed if you measure circuits that are typically higher in noise and distortion.

ARTA is a good starting point though IMO. You can use it with the built in generator or with some other software/hardware based generator.


/Peter

[dave slagle]

The measured results that i have seen of the 0202 and the 0404 were similar enough to make me believe that the packaging and options were the only difference between the two.

dave

[Pan]

They use different converters.


/Peter

[dave slagle]

Ahh,

I was going by this info. I downloaded the specs and the A/d's are the same but the D/A's are indeed different. The 0202 also had a lower listed jitter.

Take a peek at the test data from the 0202 and it looks pretty good to me. The dip in response above 20K can be corrected for with Audiotester, and the other thing audiotester does is asynchronous measurements so external sources can be used for automated capture. One of the things i want to measure is RIAA accuracy and frequency response using test records as a source.

Of course the 0404 will do everything the 0202 will do and then some, but given my propensity to blow things up, I'd rather two 0202's than a single 0404 :-)

I have seen ARTA but it does not mention 192K sampling possibilities. (audiotester at least alludes to it stating maximum frequency measurement in an FFT is 96K (SF/2)

dave

[Pan]

ARTA does 192ks/s and you can analyse external signals. Not sure how it handles sweeps but I'd be surprised if it didn't fix that.

You can import wav into ARTA for analysis.


/Peter

[dave slagle]

I currently have and love the stingray but it is tough to integrate with other RTA's. Winaudio MLS supports it and i have the basic version which gets me to 48K, but the 1meg sample rate suggests possibilities much higher. Sure it is only 8 bit, but that is plenty and a reasonably automated FR measurement out to 500Khz would be perfect for me. My initial goal is not to look into the shadows which requires bit depth but to look into behavior well out beyond the audio band which requires sample rate.

My initial thinking was that if audiotester supported the stingray (they provide the dll's) then an asynchronous mode measurement would give a nice plot by simply sweeping a signal generator. I have pretty much given up on this dream which has inspired my acceptance of a 96Khz top end for an easy automated measurement. Then i can break out the stingray and excel for the higher bandwidth needs.

I have actually been starting to think i can just use the data logger function of the stingray to create a file and then use something like LTspice to interpolate it out but the learning curve for that is a bit steeper than I have time for since i am essentially a luddite. Converting the datalogger output to a WAV file seems like another interesting option (is that possible?) since i do not need real time results!

dave

[Pan]

Isn't Stingray a 12bit device? Website says so.

However I have a similar aproach/set up as you. I went for a Picoscope 3224 (12bit 20MS/s for a 10MHz BW) for the fast stuff and a audiointerface + ARTA and other sowtware as a basis.

I think you could use the Scope as a logger and if you can convert that data to wav it should be possible to analyse in ARTA. Or you could use a recorder software as Audacity or similar to capture a waveform/sweep etc. with your audiointerface and export that as a wav into ARTA.

I have a Echo Audiofire4 but I'm thinking on a EMU 0404-USB for the measurement rig because the Audiofire4 has interupt problems which I have not been able to get rid off. Other firewire interfaces have given good results in the same app as the Audiofire4.

EMU 0404-USB seems very good to me. It has plenty of I/O and very good measured performance.

Hopefully the USB connection is less buggy than the firewire port. Firewire seems to be problematic even though some say it's better and more stable than USB. That does not reflect my experiences though and from surfing the net it seems like klicks and interupts are very common with firewire. Sometimes it can be solved with the settings in Windows but it seems sometimes and cen not be made to work. Crappy firewire chipset on the motherboard and/or crappy drivers can be the explanation.

A couple of years ago I used ISA based Clio lite and I have been looking out for a new set up for years. Right now it looks like EMU 0404-USB with ARTA is the obvious way to go.

For about $200 you get performance that you had to pay at least ten times as much for ten years ago, even outperforming AudioPrecision1


/Peter