Tuning Chart

[BobDavis88@aol.com]

from Horace Greeley:
>I am not sure if I totally agree with Bob about accuracy here.  There seems
>to me to be room for interpolation resulting in an accurate relative
>reading.
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Greetings, Horace,
I guess it depends upon what we mean by accuracy. Weren't the marks one cent
each, and fairly close together, making sub-cent resolution difficult? And
I'm not sure of the fineness of accuracy of the rotation of the wheels. I
think we're talking here about the old twelve-wheeled StroboConn as
distinguished from the StroboTuner, which had one wheel, and their accuracy
might have been different. Jim Coleman, Sr. can probably help out on all of
this, if he's listening. As I said, I haven't seen one in years, so I may be
talking through my hat.

>The difficulty, for me, was to have sufficient access to a
>properly working Sight-O-Tuner to really become acquainted with how it works
>and what it can and canot do.  The tremendous advantage of the Sight-O-Tuner
>remains that it presents real-time analog visual display of the tone
>production process (attack, decay, release, whatever your preferred
>terminology).  With all respect to those who use other electronic tuning
>aids, the Sight-O-Tuner is still the only reasonably available reductive
>tool which allows this kind of analysis.
snip----------
>Best to all.
>Horace
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Do you mean the StroboXxx rather than the Sight-O-Tuner? If so, I agree that
it's neat to be able to see the whole tone at once, which of course is also
the advantage of that most sophisticated of tuning aids, the ear. In the end,
the ear is simply unbeatable at averaging all the differences in partial
balance, pitch change with time, scaling changes, etc., but excruciatingly
fine visual resolution is invaluable to help point out the individual
elements of what we are hearing, and helps us learn "selective listening".  I
wouldn't be without it.

Finally, it's probably just a matter of time before someone clever develops
software which will give a visual graph of the frequency and amplitude of
multiple partials as they change with time.

Regards,
Bob