Burst tones in audio measurements

Are burst tones being used in audio measurements and if so, would it be possible to provide some examples?

By audio measurements I mean anything that is related to audio equipment (i.e audio circuits, linear or switching power supplies, etc...)

Thank you!
 
Sure. I remember this guy Joe D'Appolito used them to test speakers.

Playing with a programmable AC source at work, I found that an ordinary driver from a plastic PC speaker could survive a couple cycles at full AC line voltage; 1500 watts or so. I'd bet a real speaker could go on to survive further - as long as the time between bursts was generous.

We used to test switching power supplies with DC transient loads all the time. I tried an AC sweep, but it failed to pinpoint where the worst case frequency response of some more rectangular shaped transient would be. (That was an attempt to make the test process more efficient...)
 
I've build the Linkwitz cosine burst generator and am using it for measuring speaker behaviour in normal rooms.
Allthough there may be more precise methods today (the original Linkwitz schematics dates back to 1980) it is quite useful.
On my first usage I managed to pinpoint an issue with a midrange speaker that sounded "not as expected" (the reason being a stupid box design of my own 🙂

The theory behind is that to avoid room reflections to disturb a measurement with a microphone you need to use a short tone burst (to seperate the direct and the reflected sound in time).
However using a simple on/off (ususally called a rectangular window) tone burst will smear the spectrum over a wide range - by using a Hamming (or was it Hann? - can't remember) window for the tone burst the spectrum is a lot more narrow.

Cheers, Martin
 
Thank you for your answers. The reason I'm asking is because I build some DIY audio stuff with linear power supplies and since I have an AWG that can generate burst tones I thought that maybe it could be useful for some measurements.