borrowed an o-scope...now what?

[acold7dusta 10+ year member]

i searched around the internet and this site and didnt come up with much info...what do i set up the oscilloscope to read the sine wave and all that? also, do i leave the speakers connected when i do the test, or have them disconnected?

thanks, the o-scope is an older textronix 465B

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[Death By Bass 10+ year member]

what are you wanting to test?

 

[acold7dusta 10+ year member]

i want to get the most out of my amps. on the speaker outputs, im imagining either voltage or current. just want to make sure im not clipping

 

[acold7dusta 10+ year member]

i got the feeler in the positive output of my speaker amp, measuring AC, and its giving me a squiggly line. dk if thats good or what

 

[Death By Bass 10+ year member]

i got the feeler in the positive output of my speaker amp, measuring AC, and its giving me a squiggly line. dk if thats good or what

that would be a sine wave... lol

if you turn the amp up (with no speakers on it) the sinewave will flatten out at the top and bottom as the amp starts to clip.

you dont want this

however, you cant really test to see if the output is clipping when playing music anyway, you really just need a simple clipping detector, that just lights up an LED when the amp clips //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/smile.gif.1ebc41e1811405b213edfc4622c41e27.gif

 

[acold7dusta 10+ year member]

well it wasnt a sine wave, it was sharp and jagged. i messed around with it for an hour and im j ust going to wait till someone that knows what there doing helps me, or i can find more info online.

thanks anyways

 

[Death By Bass 10+ year member]

well it wasnt a sine wave, it was sharp and jagged. i messed around with it for an hour and im j ust going to wait till someone that knows what there doing helps me, or i can find more info online.
thanks anyways

if you were playing music, then yeah, ofcourse its going to be a jaggered line.

what goes in, comes out (plus some distortion)

there's really not much you can do with the scope, unless all you're playing is sinewaves, such as at an SPL competition, THEN you could use the scope to set the amp gains at max power without clipping.

 

[JimJ 5,000+ posts]

If you set your gains so the amp doesn't clip on sinewaves, it will never clip on music, provided the music isn't recorded over the reference level of the sinewave you used...