![[-]](https://theultimatetone.com/images/collapse.png "[-]")
10-04-2018, 10:11 PM
Hi Guys
Being an analogue guy I've always had analogue oscilloscopes. My first one was a Philips 50MHz 2-ch that I bought new right from their warehouse for about $1500cdn. That was 1984 and it worked until about 2012 or so. I used a borrowed scope for a while, but it was old and temperamental, then bought a new GW Instek GOS-620 which is 20MHz 2-ch with a simple front panel. It worked for 18-months and then the vertical positioning went awry. A sine wave in the bottom 2cm of the display would look okay, but if you moved it upwards using the vertical position control, the top of the sine would distort, then flatten to zero a centimetre before the top of the screen. There was no way to accurately look at large waves or complex waves.
When I bought the Instek, it was about $560cdn and i looked at DSOs, as well. A DSO is a digital storage oscilloscope. They were initially designed and optimised for looking at digital systems where wave forms were mostly square waves and strings of pulses. None of that requires much vertical resolution, which was fortunate because at the time DSO were being born, analog-to-digital-converters (ADCs) were expensive to make. ADCs got better with time, faster, stronger - not bionic, though! - and are at the heart of 90% of all DSO still made. But now, you can get bandwidth out to 100s of GHz and memory depth unheard of a decade or so ago.
Initially, DSOs had a latency issue, where it would take a short amount of time to build up the waveform before the scope would display it. Modern computer technology is blindingly fast and the latency is pretty much gone The only time you would have an issue is if you set the time base to be many 10s or 100s of seconds - something you could not do with an analogue scope - so, nothing to worry about for what we look at in guitar and hifi amps. I was concerned about that latency a year or so ago when I decided to go with the Instek CRT scope. I did not know what many of the DSO specs meant until the Instek partially died and I had to re-investigate scopes and figured I'd get a DSO this time.
Being an analogue guy I've always had analogue oscilloscopes. My first one was a Philips 50MHz 2-ch that I bought new right from their warehouse for about $1500cdn. That was 1984 and it worked until about 2012 or so. I used a borrowed scope for a while, but it was old and temperamental, then bought a new GW Instek GOS-620 which is 20MHz 2-ch with a simple front panel. It worked for 18-months and then the vertical positioning went awry. A sine wave in the bottom 2cm of the display would look okay, but if you moved it upwards using the vertical position control, the top of the sine would distort, then flatten to zero a centimetre before the top of the screen. There was no way to accurately look at large waves or complex waves.
When I bought the Instek, it was about $560cdn and i looked at DSOs, as well. A DSO is a digital storage oscilloscope. They were initially designed and optimised for looking at digital systems where wave forms were mostly square waves and strings of pulses. None of that requires much vertical resolution, which was fortunate because at the time DSO were being born, analog-to-digital-converters (ADCs) were expensive to make. ADCs got better with time, faster, stronger - not bionic, though! - and are at the heart of 90% of all DSO still made. But now, you can get bandwidth out to 100s of GHz and memory depth unheard of a decade or so ago.
Initially, DSOs had a latency issue, where it would take a short amount of time to build up the waveform before the scope would display it. Modern computer technology is blindingly fast and the latency is pretty much gone The only time you would have an issue is if you set the time base to be many 10s or 100s of seconds - something you could not do with an analogue scope - so, nothing to worry about for what we look at in guitar and hifi amps. I was concerned about that latency a year or so ago when I decided to go with the Instek CRT scope. I did not know what many of the DSO specs meant until the Instek partially died and I had to re-investigate scopes and figured I'd get a DSO this time.
