Test and Measurement News

Audio Partnership reduces test times with a dScope Series III

Cambridge, UK: Audio Partnership, one of the UK's leading Hi-Fi manufacturers and home to such leading brands as Cambridge Audio, Mordaunt-Short and Opus Technologies, has purchased another Prism Sound dScope Series III audio analyzer for development testing of its Hi-Fi prototypes. The unit was supplied by Prism Sound's UK distributor, Thurlby Thandar Instrument Distribution (TTid).

dScope Series III

"The dScope Series III is quite flexible with the test tones it produces, the different methods of analysis it provides and the connectivity to our products," explains David Moore, Electronic Design Engineer at Audio Partnership. "The versatility of the FFT measurements means we can usually get to the bottom of problems quite quickly. As it is portable, we use this instead of other equipment for tests that need to be set up in specific places (such as a heat test in a separate room), and also we find this very useful for intermittence and cycle testing, as limits can be set and logged."

Audio Partnership is based in London. Set up in 1994 (though some of its brands extend way back into the 1960s) it employs a 30-strong development team of engineers with expertise spread across most audio disciplines.

Moore purchased the dScope Series III analyzer for the company after attending one of Prism Sound's Test & Measurement training seminars, and in particular admires the automated measurement and analysis features of the unit.

"We used dScope's automation tools to test a batch of 50 pre-production products where we wanted to perform design testing on the majority of the units," he says. "We mainly wanted to do this to see how our design would be affected by manufacturing tolerances. Ordinarily, to manually do design testing - not to be confused with production testing - on a unit would take one to two days, so we wrote a script to run some tests and put the results into Excel, which reduced the test time per unit to less than one hour."

Moore says that the exercise worked really well and gave good results. "We plan to carry on using the dScope for our development indefinitely," he says. "It fits in very well with the nature of what we do."