Computer based measurement opinions?

Gang, being kind of an "old school" tech with an "old school" bench, I have been very interested in doing some upgrades on my tools using some modern approaches to testing. I have been very keen on reading all the CLIO threads on the forum, and really want to make the jump to something similar to this. I am having a problem justifying the high outlay since I spend much more time servicing audio amplifiers and performing FM alignments than I do measuring transducers, and I want to use whatever I buy to actually make some money with. I have an excellent Sencore/HP/Tektronics bench, but I wanted a tool that would simplify workflow in some situations, generate documentation for customers and quality control, log data, etc.

I was browsing around the other day and found this soundcard based suite: http://www.virtins.com/ .

I still have my 15 year old CardDplus ISA soundcard from my old recording studio days. It is extremely clean, with the lowest SNR and THD+N specs for a PC card of it's day (I think), and it still runs right up there with the best of them. I have an old ABIT BM6 motherboard with a couple of ISA slots that I could dedicate to this, so I was thinking about giving it a go. I guess my questions are: do you folks use something that is similar, is it useful, and is it worthwhile?

Thanks for your thoughts!

Brian

I have been using Speaker workshop for a while. It is freeware, but rather old. http://www.speakerworkshop.com/

It takes some effort to set up and build the necessary hw to make it work. You will want to read this: http://www.claudionegro.com/

Before you look into speaker workshop you should check your soundcard's performance with e.g. Right mark audio analyzer: http://audio.rightmark.org/index_new.shtml

These freeware tools might be worth while, but you will certainly have to put in some effort to make them work for you. For hobby purposes they are a very good way to go, for professional use I would look for something with like Clio or Woofer tester with the accompanying hardware to make the tests easier and most likely more reliable.

Here is another free tool, where you get way more than what you pay for:

http://www.hometheatershack.com/roomeq/

The new version lets you plot and compare mulitple sweeps on the same screen.