Korg NTS-2 DIY oscilloscope and wave generator kit
korg.com
korg.com
The equipment was old, so the switches and controls were flaky. There really was no clear explanation of what "triggering" was doing, therefore, what the display really meant. Any explanation would work for only the 1/2 of the class for whom the scopes were actually working. The professor, a theoretical physicist, was lost. I was already an electronics buff, and knew my way around a scope, but could think my way past its foibles.
The lab was a failure. I've talked to people who still remember the "oscilloscope lab" from college.
What I thought, and still think, is we were teaching the wrong thing, which was how to make sense of a futzy machine with a bad UI. Instead, wouldn't it be nice if there were a machine that would let you... 1) Measure voltage as a function of time. 2) Display it. 3) Analyze it (store it, etc.). For most simple waveforms, you don't need triggering if you can have data storage and display instead.
Today's scopes are vastly less flaky, and have storage, but still have the same unintelligible controls, made worse by cramming more functions into fewer knobs and buttons. I'm talking about you, Rigol, though I've bought two Rigol scopes.
Something like this Korg scope might be a very nice thing if it solves, not the electronic or measurement problem, but the UI problem for what it's intended to do. Display audio waveforms and basic analysis in a straightforward way.
Myself, I've gone a different way, which is a homemade measurement board based on a microcontroller, and a Jupyter notebook.
A good source for this has been the Digilent tools, in particular the Analog Discovery 2[1] in combination with a bread board and some basic components[2]. It is inexpensive enough that you can just buy one for a new college grad and give it to them on their first day. Then expect them to have it available when they are trying to learn the stuff you need them to know. Knowing that everyone has this basic set of gear (or kit as our UK folks like to call it) Means that even on Zoom to a remote engineer you can say "Okay hook up the following bits to your machine and share your Waveforms screen, we'll go over what is going on and why it is important ..."
The best part is that if you later need to remote into a lab bench setup you have the bases skills that are essential to letting you look at what is going on with the thing that isn't working on the bench.
[1] https://digilent.com/reference/test-and-measurement/analog-d...
[2] They used to have a great pre-packaged bundle of components for analog work (sponsored by Analog Devices :-)) which was another $100 and had pretty much all you needed for learning the kinds of things they needed to know to be effective.
Triggering basically means a positive or negative transition over/under a certain level. You can set the level manually, and this gives you a basic left/right (phase) shift on the display.
It's really not a bad UI if you understand what it's trying to do.
Often you want to see what happens after some reference point or - literally - some triggering event like a pulse.
Constant sampling doesn't solve the problem. You still need to work out where the point of interest is. That's fairly simple for a static repeating waveform, but not at all a trivial problem for any waveform that changes over time - as many audio waveforms do.
How To Draw Mushrooms On An Oscilloscope With Sound
I also find it amusing how many of these "DIY" kits only have you DIY the very final, simple assembly (such as attaching a display and putting it in an enclosure), likely to sidestep FCC rules regarding testing of devices.
I'd expect this thing to be seized by customs if you attempt to import it into the European Union.
Also in this case if you scroll down to the spec sheet the mains voltage measurements are done with a x10 probe, meaning you'd only get ~23 volts out. Obviously that won't prevent user error from leaving the probe at x1, but at that point the device would most likely destroy itself before you can even touch it anyways.
Couple of friends got stuff from Alibaba confiscated and destroyed by customs because it wasn't marked with valid CE and RoHS marks. I'm inclined to believe that at least German customs are actively looking for electronics - they're seizing around 250k general electronics plus 250k phones each year [1].
> Obviously that won't prevent user error from leaving the probe at x1, but at that point the device would most likely destroy itself before you can even touch it anyways.
The other scenario would be the user testing a socket and managing to connect scope GND to hot and scope input to neutral. At that point, most of that scope's "housing" aka its PCBs will be extremely dangerous to touch.
Advertising anything not actually complying with the numerous safety regulations surrounding electricity (particularly, IEC 61010-2-030) is so incredibly ignorant that it makes me question the rest of the entire product quality.
[1] https://de.statista.com/infografik/25011/anzahl-der-vom-zoll...
User "dal" offers a cheaper alternative (indirectly complaining that the Korg one is too expensive), while "blub" talks about that cheaper alternative is cutting corners.
So on talks about the Korg being too expensive, while the other talks about the aliexpress model being too cheap.
[0]: https://www.kraftmusic.com/brands/korg/synthesizers/nts2
If so, could you please provide the link to exactly what oscilloscope you have in mind, as I could buy that instead of NTS-2 in that case.
You can find old Tektronix App Notes here: https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/Application_Notes
Tektronix's Measurement Concepts are here: https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/Concepts_Series
Both are free and very well-written. I would skip the "Circuit Concepts" series, as it's mostly focused on circuits for analog oscilloscopes. While neither resource is specifically focused specifically on music production, studying them will give you a broad understanding of "what's going on under the hood", which you can apply to music production.
If you really want "here's how you add pink noise using Korg's MS-20 (sold separately)", then I suppose you could just buy their book.
> Does it also come with a "flexible waveform generator", spectrum analyzer and tuner too?
The first two are table stakes for cheapie Chinese oscilloscopes, since... oh, probably at least 10 years ago.
The "tuner" on this one is just a different UI for the FFT/spectrum analyzer. I suppose that could be it's USP, but why not just learn how to use the FFT/SA if you're excited about having that feature anyway?
This product focuses on an entirely different market than say Rigol or Keysight scopes. Think of it as an "Audio signal analyzer / generator".
That said though I will still buy it just to fuck with people using a real(tm) scope.
but the price is even higher than the korg. it is nice, and works well, and seems to have more functionality.
shameless plug, it's my product
The documentation looks really nice, and it’s extremely rare for a company to provide any printed material with their hardware, other than the multi language safety card. Many will just provide a basic how-to support page to get you along your merry way, but this looks superb, and a great way to get people learning. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bulk of development costs lie in that book.
The will also be providing firmware updates, patches and quality enhancements, which are likely to be much better than your open-source project in GitHub with a moderate client base.
At the end of day for people who will actually use it convenience probably beats other factors and having exactly right set of features, ability directly plug audio connectors, UI and software optimized for audio workflow can be preferable even if comparing raw specs and build quality to electronic tools makes it feels like a cheap DIY/kit or toy.
A 100MHz instrument scope like that HP is way overkill for such a purpose and will have an overwhelming number of controls and features. Worse, it will be easy to get it in a state where nothing is appearing and you have to fiddle with buttons to just see a waveform-- this is NOT something a musician wants, not ever, and especially not when live.
Compared to it and the Mordax Data, the Korg offering is interesting.
Personally, I use an Expert Sleepers ES-9 connected to my laptop with VCV Rack scopes and spectrum analyzers. The ES-9 is a great Swiss army knife module, albeit greedy on the +12V rail and somewhat costly. I'm still longing for a proper 4 channels scope.
something like the labjack u3 would probably suffice with a bit of signal conditioning. (and learning how to do that would be way more educational and relevant than snapping together a no-solder kit.)
you don't get to define "garbage" for everyone.