Noob cheap and dirty speaker measurements

[neil_kaye]

Hi,
I just finished building a pair of well published DIY speakers. I am interested in performing a series of cheap and dirty measurements on the speakers to see how the measure up. I am not looking for anything fancy a simply SPL graph (freq. verse db) would probably satisfy my curiosity.
In my mind the most straight forward and probablyy rough way to do this would be to do the following:
1. Purchase a handheld SPL meter off ebay
2. Fix spl meter on a tripod 1 meter from speaker.
3. Connect speaker to amp and run the stereophile test freq CD.
4. Plot the measurements from the SPL meter at teh various freq ona graph.

Since all the points are reltive does it really matter that the amp and spl meter are not calibrated?
Is there something i am missing?

Any other thoughts and ideas on cheap and dirty speaker measurements would be greatly appreciated.
I did read this article: http://ldsg.snippets.org/HORNS/measure.html
but is involves buying several items, soundcard, calibrated mic, preamp.

Thanks
Neil

 

[PeteMcK]

SYNRTA is free, very easy to use. I use it with an uncalibrated electret mic & my computer (You need to burn a Pink Noise CD, but SYNRTA produces that for you):

http://www.libinst.com/SynRTA.htm

 

[ente]

ARTA

.... maybe the ARTA-family (fully working demo) is also interesting for you. Have a look on this:

http://www.fesb.hr/~mateljan/arta/download.htm
http://www.fesb.hr/~mateljan/arta/support.htm

Regards
Heinrich

 

[critofur]

Would this preamp:

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?&Partnumber=320-204

Be suitable for use with the cheap Panasonic electret mic capsules?

 

[Svein_B]

Would this preamp:

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?&Partnumber=320-204

Be suitable for use with the cheap Panasonic electret mic capsules?

If you have a sound-card with microphone input, you can do without the preamp. You just need to power the Panasonic mic.

Look at my posting here: Powering Panasonic WM61-A capsules

I have used this with reasonable results with the built-in notebook soundcards, and very good performance with external USB.

The preamp from PE does not appear to power the microphone.

SveinB.