The goto program for audio measurement in the Internet age is RightMark Audio Analyzer (RMAA). It’s not an easy program to use in isolation, and is used best with some old-skool analogue technology. In particular, it doesn’t really do absolute level in any way – everything is referenced to 0dBFS.
RMAA testing is deconstructed by NwAvGuy here. His thesis is that it is impossible to use RMAA right. particularly if you have no experience of analogue electronics and no other test gear. And I’m guilty as charged of publishing RMAA test results on the internet 🙂
It saddens me a little bit that measurement has now become go out and buy £x,000 worth of test gear, plug it it, attach to D.U.T. press the button and report the result. And if you can’t do that, well, no Audio Precision test kit, no comment. I’m not dissing NwAvGuy’s observation – it’s the loss of other ways of testing audio gear I regret. I don’t test for distortion – I scan for it. That’s because I’m testing finished gear usually for how noisy it is with mics at low levels. If distortion/frequency response looks okay/reasonable with RMAA that’s great, if it doesn’t I look for what I have done wrong in setup. Most manufacturers get the distortion and frequency response basics right, but mic preamp noise does vary because most audio recording is music and therefore has plenty of signal, so preamp noise is not usually a key parameter in a field recorder.
Way back when I was working at BBC Designs, using their EP14/1 test set things were a little more from first principles than ‘press the button of this expensive gear and report back’. The EP14/1 was basically a tone source and a meter with a precision attenuator in front of it.The meter was used comparatively – you would adjust the attenuators to make it read the same as a reference reading, and the wanted information was in the different setting of the attenuators. This way any nonlinearity of the meter scale was greatly minimised. Continue reading “Audio Measurements and beyond rightMark”