Test and Measurement News

Second dScope Series III adopted by Akustica

Cambridge, UK: Prism Sound's dScope Series III family of audio analyzers offer analogue and digital audio signal generation and analysis, plus support for digital audio carrier testing, quasi-anechoic microphone/loudspeaker analysis and testing of Windows™ sound devices.

This comprehensive feature-set is proving useful to a wide range of customers, including Akustica, maker of the world's smallest and only single-chip MEMS (MicroElectroMechanical systems) microphones.

Having successfully used dScope Series III to test products in its labs, Akustica has now acquired a second instrument so that its Applications Engineers can test products in the field.

Dr. Michael Offenberg, Akustica's VP of Engineering, says: "We use dScope series III to test frequency response, sensitivity, noise floor, SNR, PSR and THD. It is also used for design verification testing (DVT) across new and existing products. One of the features we like best is its easy, clean and customizable user interface. It also offers significant scripting options and these have enabled us to create an automated test system in combination with standard test equipment (using GPIB) and custom test boards."

Prism Sound's dScope Series III instrument includes precision analogue and highly-optimised digital outputs and inputs. Precise and automatic gain-ranging allows high resolution measurements over a massive range, from a few micro-volts to more than 150 volts RMS, and from less than 1 Hz to over 90kHz. Its interface processor uses dedicated DSP to provide a wide range of real time measurements, while its software uses the host PC for almost unlimited number crunching and analysis options such as Fast Fourier Transforms, unique 'Smart FFT Detectors', swept sine and multi-tone testing. Designed to be highly programmable, the dScope Series III can be automated from a wide range of third-party software using Active X controls, or internally using VBScript.

dScope Series III is now available as an analogue-only variant, making it ideally suited to those engineers who are currently only concerned with audio analysis in the analogue domain.