Test and Measurement News

Prism Sound and ECHO Korea bring dScope test and measurement technology to Korea’s burgeoning electronics industry

Prism Sound has appointed Seoul-based ECHO Korea as principal distributor for the company’s range of audio test and measurement equipment. The company, which was established in 2001, already sells Data Acquisition systems and distributes products for Fluke, Agilent and Tektronix.

ECHO Korea’s president, Young Hun Jeon, says the market for test and measurement equipment in Korea is growing, thanks to new applications such as broadcast digital equipment, Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) and digital related products.

Prism Sound’s compact and cost effective dScope Series III audio test and measurement tool is ideally suited to the needs of these developers because it allows for the high precision generation and analysis of analogue and digital audio and delivers the functionality and precision needed for testing the latest audio technology.

“Currently, Audio Precision has over 80% of the audio test and measurement market in Korea and until now there has been no competition for their products,” Young Hun Jeon says. “There have been other companies offering test equipment but it hasn’t been based on PC operation, which is how most customers in Korea prefer to work. The Prism Sound dScope allows us to offer a viable alternative because it is PC based and can easily compete with an AP unit in terms of capability and price. From the demonstrations we have already conducted with our customers, we know there is enormous potential for the dScope in Korea and plenty of interest in its capability and price structure.”

This interest has already resulted in ECHO’s first dScope sale – to Neo Fidelity Inc, a company that develops chips for the digital amplifiers used in mobile phones, digital televisions and wireless amplifiers and speakers.

“Neo Fidelity is using its dScope to test S/R ratio, THD+N, Separation, Power, Frequency Response, FFT analysis and Multitone Test and has already indicated a desire to buy another unit in the near future,” Young Hun Jeon says.

Launched in 2002, Prism Sound’s dScope Series III is suitable for a wide range of digital and analogue audio applications and is used in many market sectors including broadcast, multimedia, CD, DVD, computer audio, transducer, digital telephony and communications. It is comprehensive and accurate for R&D, portable and intuitive for maintenance and field service, and fast, automatic and IT-friendly for the production line.

dScope Series III is hosted on a Windows PC and a significant portion of its functionality is implemented in software and re-programmable hardware such as DSP and FPGA’s.  This approach allows considerable scope for upgrading and since the launch in 2002 there have been significant additions to the product’s feature set. This pattern of continual development is set to continue during 2006 and improvements so far developed are available to existing users at no additional cost.

dScope is comprehensive and accurate for R&D, portable and intuitive for maintenance and field service, and fast, automatic and IT-friendly for the production line.

As well as covering the traditional audio test functions, dScope incorporates the important new features needed to work with the latest audio technologies, such as digital televisions, MP3 devices, digital power amplifiers and more. These include a uniquely simple, state-of-the-art synchronous multi-tone capability, which can measure dozens of parameters simultaneously. Digital interface test tools such as carrier waveform and eye-pattern display, jitter measurement and AES3/IEC60958 channel status generation and analysis are included, as well as support for higher sampling rates.  dScope also has a growing family of accessories including a passive low-pass filter used for digital amplifier testing, a multi-channel I2S digital interface used for direct connection to digital processing integrated circuits (ICs) and an I/O switcher used for testing devices with more than 2 audio channels.

Korea’s burgeoning electronics industry makes it an ideal sales target for the dScope and ECHO has already identified a number of companies that could benefit from Prism Sound’s technology. These include companies in the MP3, digital amp and semiconductor markets, through to those involved with mobile phones, PDA, digital broadcasting, DVD and Set Top Boxes, car audio, digital TV and the PC market.

Young Hun Jeon adds: “We see particular strength for Prism products in the DMB market, which is a type of broadcasting that uses RF to deliver content to the PC and the mobile phone. In simple terms, this allows consumers to watch television wherever they are. DMB development is currently a boom market for Korea and there is huge demand for DMB related products.”