Probably nothing more tonight - received a piece of test equipment from Amazon today and will be checking it out.
When testing audio gear, it is useful to be able to feed it with a controlled and reproducible signal. Normally, you would use an oscillator of some sort.
About 20 years ago, waveform generators started appearing where you could use not only the usual sine, square or pulse waveforms but also arbitrary ones that you could load into the unit. These were a lot better but priced accordingly in the $4K range ($4K in 1990 = $7K today).
Flash forward to today and sitting on my bench in the Radio Room is a Siglent SDG800 Function/Arbitrary Waveform Generator. Under $300 at Amazon. There is a USB port on the back that connects to a computer for control and data storage. There is another USB port on the front and you can use a thumb drive to store the waveforms you want to use for testing. The functions available are huge - all sorts of pulse and gating options, remote triggering - this puppy blows the 1990's technology out of the water for 1/20th the cost (and it only weighs six pounds).
Checking this puppy out...
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