Buying Old Oscilloscopes

The big advantage I find a DSO has, is that it is a memory scope (if you want to). The signal on the screen can be frozen and / or very slowly changing signals can be made visible and seen over a long time. An analog scope can only practically show real time signals, i.e. signals that are there at that point in time. Given that audio often is of low frequencies and can be quite complex as a signal it can sometimes be difficult to get a steady image on an analog (non memory) scope (it may not trigger properly). A single trigger on a DSO will give you a steady image most of the times. Furthermore, a DSO allows you to move your viewpoint quite a bit (without changing the time scale) and will make it possible to see much more of a signal than what follows the trigger signal. Modern devices are of limited size and weight and luckily are not too expensive. My DSO is way cheaper than the analog dual 20 Mhz HAMEG I bought some 45 years ago (and it is still working!).

Quite a few budget devices use 8 bit ADCs which allows for limited granularity when sampling signals. As a consequence signals often show stair case patterns. But I found that I got used to that quite quickly because for my audio use cases the shape of a signal is often more important than the absolute amplitude values.

I have a bench device by OWON and a few of those cheap “DSO FNIRSI-150” devices. And in my modular each 12 inch sub rack has an instance of Scope-O-Matic, an Arduino Nano based oscilloscope in Eurorack format because you know the saying:

You can never have enough VCAs and every rack deserves its own scope!

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