Lab View

The nature of vintage audio transformers is that their popularity is sometimes based on their imperfections. Things like shifting HF phase response, different core materials and various parasitic reactances can subtly alter the sound in a pleasing manner.

In the ongoing effort to learn more about this Art/Science of Audio Magnetics and quantify these elusive traits, I designed an audio transformer analyzer with a 1 MHz USB scope and LabVIEW to characterize things like Amplitude, Phase, THD, Group Delay, Impedance, Turns Ratio, Voltage Ratio plus a host of others and deliver a full report of the data in HTML form. 

Using a common 4 channel Focusrite USB home recording interface and the DSP power of LabVIEW, I was able to create a 24 bit Audio Analyzer to rival professional products at a fraction of the cost. I use this analyzer every day to create and refine audio designs. It delivers a full report of all the measurements in HTML

During the production of the Tube Equipment Corporation SR 71 Compressor, it became crucial to obtain large quantities of the main Remote Cutoff gain reduction tubes and hand select them for best THD and plate curve matching. Even with a Tektronix curve tracer, doing this manually was terribly inefficient so I designed an automated tube curve tracer of my own which would select batches of 8 tubes at a time for one unit. Automating the process cut this task time down dramatically.