Spectra Plus or SpectraLab or ???

[[email protected]]

Has anyone else compared SpectraLab and Spectra Plus recently? Or is
there something better? I want and am willing to pay for a good
program, not a shareware money pit that requires you to buy many
broken add-ons before you discover you really can't do anything
anyway. But I don't like the idea of paying a kilobuck for a badly
supported program either, particularly when I could have had a good
one for the same price or less. I can't afford to buy them all at
that kind of rate. And that means I have to figure out which is the
real program, and which is the abandoned potemkin village. And all
within the 30 day trial period. (When there even *is* a 30 day trial
period.)

I'm currently evaluating Spectra Plus for a potential purchase. Now I
discover there's a similar program SpectraLab also available, which
I'm going to try also.

Spectra Plus now runs on XP (and is said to run on Vista), and there
is a ~1,000,000 point FFT, and it supports 24bit and 96Khz. Long ago,
you needed SpectraLab to get those features. Once available through
"Sound Technology", Spectra Plus is now only available through the
creator at Pioneer Hill Software, whose website is quite informative
(even lists prices). I was pleased that the creator is responsive and
is currently checking out a problem I discovered with my soundcard, an
Emu 0404 USB: I can't select the digital input or output from the
program yet (and the card doesn't provide a patchmix utility). We'll
see if he can fix that. Also I've had the program hang my system
several times.

Now it seems you can only get SpectraLab from the "Sound Technology"
website, which uses flash a lot so I can hardly see anything there,
but I did finally manage to download the program (I think). The
pmgrp.com link to SpectraLab is completely broken. (Is anyone home at
pmgrp?) You have to email soundtechnology.com to get prices or just
about any other kind of information. I'm wondering what kind of
support they have. Or need. I don't find the website very confidence
inspiring. From the front page, I can't do anything, I found the
download page with a google search.

Charles Peterson
San Antonio, Texas

[Arny Krueger]

> wrote in message


> Has anyone else compared SpectraLab and Spectra Plus
> recently? Or is there something better? I want and am
> willing to pay for a good program, not a shareware money
> pit that requires you to buy many broken add-ons before
> you discover you really can't do anything anyway. But I
> don't like the idea of paying a kilobuck for a badly
> supported program either, particularly when I could have
> had a good one for the same price or less. I can't
> afford to buy them all at that kind of rate. And that
> means I have to figure out which is the real program, and
> which is the abandoned potemkin village. And all within
> the 30 day trial period. (When there even *is* a 30 day
> trial period.)

> I'm currently evaluating Spectra Plus for a potential
> purchase. Now I discover there's a similar program
> SpectraLab also available, which I'm going to try also.

I used to use this software a lot, I built www.pcavtech.com using it very
heavily.

My recollection is that SpectraLab is Spectra Plus on steroids.

> Spectra Plus now runs on XP (and is said to run on
> Vista), and there is a ~1,000,000 point FFT, and it
> supports 24bit and 96Khz.

When I used it, it could run with just about any sample rate that the audio
interface supported, up to 192 KHz and beyond.

> Long ago, you needed
> SpectraLab to get those features. Once available through
> "Sound Technology", Spectra Plus is now only available
> through the creator at Pioneer Hill Software, whose
> website is quite informative (even lists prices).

SpectraPlus looks a lot like the SpectraLab product that I used several
years back, but perhaps with some new features.

> I was
> pleased that the creator is responsive and is currently
> checking out a problem I discovered with my soundcard, an
> Emu 0404 USB: I can't select the digital input or output
> from the program yet (and the card doesn't provide a
> patchmix utility). We'll see if he can fix that. Also
> I've had the program hang my system several times.

There are two kinds of soundcard drivers - MMC (Windows Multimedia) and
ASIO. Historically, Spectra supported just MMC, and not ASIO. Historically
EMu has had stronger support for ASIO than MMC. IME Spectra can be very
critical of the quality of sound card drivers, and lock up the machine when
things are just right.

> Now it seems you can only get SpectraLab from the "Sound
> Technology" website, which uses flash a lot so I can
> hardly see anything there, but I did finally manage to
> download the program (I think). The pmgrp.com link to
> SpectraLab is completely broken.

So I see.

> (Is anyone home at
> pmgrp?) You have to email soundtechnology.com to get
> prices or just about any other kind of information. I'm
> wondering what kind of support they have. Or need. I
> don't find the website very confidence inspiring.

I agree.

> From the front page, I can't do anything, I found the download
> page with a google search.

Yes, and you probably found some things about cracks.

So what happened with Spectra and I?

I discovered the Audio Rightmark program - freeware that pretty well does
everything I did with spectra - automatically. The program is called the
Rightmark Audio Analyzer and its freeware version is quite competent.

I also learned how to do a lot with the FFT analysis module of
Audition/CoolEdit Pro.

As far as the acoustical measurement features of Spectra - a competitive
program is SMAART .

[[email protected]]

Thanks, Arny! Good to hear you again. It was your earlier posts here
about SpectraLab that inspired me to post here for advice.

Your PCABX stuff looks wonderful and very useful. Now that I have a
decent soundcard (and with convenient headphone jack) on my
undedicated PC, I intend to be checking it out soon. I always wanted
to hear and compare some of these "differences" for myself.

It seems that from the SoundTechnology.com site one can only download
SpectraRTA, a very inferior and limited product. Using SpectraRTA I
get THD+N of 0.002% for my Emu 0404 USB in loopback, even after
selecting "24 bit" mode. Both RightMark Audio Analyzer and SpectraLab
give numbers around 0.001%.

Perhaps one can obtain SpectraLab by emailing SoundTechnology.com and
asking for it. I have only been able to find downloadable SpectraLab
at cracker sites. (And, in fact, it is all over the cracker
universe.) I hesitate to download from such a place for a number of
reasons, including the possibility of ending up with a Trojan Horse.
For that matter, I wonder about the credibility of
SoundTechnology.com, given their mostly broken website. I have now
confirmed that you can't do a single thing from their home page at
all. I wonder if they're just some folks who bought the
SoundTechnology domain name when the last of the companies of that
name went under. In that case, they may be no more trustworthy than
the crackers. I'd appreciate any stories confirming their recent
trustworthiness.

Now it does appear the SpectraPlus has incorporated the features that
used to put SpectraLab above it. And perhaps more. And the Pioneer
Hill Software that stands behind it, with periodic updates, seems to
be real, if not necessarily perfect. Perhaps it's biggest defect is
its propensity to crash. A friend of mine is now reporting that same
problem.

RightMark Audio Analyzer is very nice for doing a quick test. I do
indeed like it very much. But for doing the exploratory research I
like to do, it is not as useful. I like having a free-running
analyzer for various purposes, and also a post-processing analyzer for
various purposes. For example, I have recently been involved with
analyzing the effect of dithering techniques on 16-bit sinewaves.
It's also fun to do such things as determine the actual THD+N of the
Sound Technology 1700B analyzer which I calibrated. For experiments
like that, RMAA isn't useful. And I like seeing the realtime effect
of changing output levels on THD. With a realtime analyzer, which
includes THD analysis and such, one can quickly zero in on the optimal
value. Not to mention evaluating such things as turntable
flutter.......

> I also learned how to do a lot with the FFT analysis module of
> Audition/CoolEdit Pro.
>
> As far as the acoustical measurement features of Spectra - a competitive
> program is SMAART .

Thanks for your other suggestions too. I still have been using
Liberty Audiosuite 3 (on a dedicated Win95 PC with fiji card) for
acoustic measurements. But it's always been a bitch to use as
realtime analyzer, or in fact anything other than its automated
tests. Very hard to get the appropriate scaling, levels, or anything
else. I complained to the author, but shortly afterwards he stopped
supporting it. And now it's seeming very limited. It has two great
features IMO, the MLS testing and the swept THD test. But with
infuriating limitations (like refusing to go below 20 Hz, or with
finer resolution than 1/6 octave). And now I'm more interested in
room analysis than MLS speaker tests, and the 44.1Khz sampling
limitation means you can't really analyze distortion above 8Khz (as
you really want to include the third harmonic). Notably the swept THD
tests always show a drop at that point.

Charles

[[email protected]]

I have gotten good response from John Pattee of Pioneer Hill Software,
the original creator and now sole distributor of Spectra Plus, so I've
gone ahead and bought Spectra Plus for ad hoc electronic
experimentation. I first tried the demo version 10 years ago, so I
know it's been around for awhile.

I have gotten no response at all from "Sound Technology" about their
well known program SpectraLab, which was at one time the higher end
competitor. It's not even clear the company exists anymore as the
website is dysfunctional. It is still possible to download a program
"SpectraRTA" from a backdoor page at that side (the home page has no
working links), but it was the "baby" program of the three and it's
not clear if anyone supports it. It seems to have no better than 16-
bit performance, which is not very useful anymore. (At one time,
Sound Technology sold all three programs: SpectraLab, Spectra Plus,
and SpectraRTA. Now Spectra Plus, the middle program, has grown to
incorporate the additional features that SpectraLab had anyway.)

I have also been using the RightMark audio analyzer and will buy the
Pro version when it supports the digital I/O on my soundcard as it is
supposed to.

Yeah, SMAART looks very interesting too. I just ran into that today
by chance. I'll put that on my wish list.

Charles