The poor freelance audio writer simply cannot afford to buy all the test gear he would like. Golly, even something as mundane as 250 watt 8 ohm resistors for testing power outputs cost around $AUS100 each … and this writer has seven of the damned things. I’d love a high-end digital storage oscilliscope, but have to make do with a cheap analogue one (still $AUS1,000). And as for measurements: well, it’s just as well that I’m a dab hand at basic mathematics!
Then, yesterday, I stumbled on some software called RightMark Audio Analyzer, put together by some excellent programmers in Russia. This software seems intended primarily for testing sound cards in computers, but if you have a good sound card then it can be used for testing other stuff as well. It measures frequency response, noise, dynamic range, total harmonic distortion, intermodulation distortion and channel crosstalk. And does it extremely well. It will generate HTML pages with the test results, graphs of all these measurements (the frequency response graph shown here is of an in-out loop of a Terratec DMX 6fire 24/96 sound card). You can even subtract two frequency responses to cancel out the effect of your sound card’s frequency aberrations when you’re measuring external stuff.
How much do reckon this would cost? How about nothing at all!