On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 06:57 AM, Jeff Green wrote:
I have a 196Hz tuning fork, open ¡°G¡±, that I used until my EE friend showed me a $25(US) Deltalabs CT-30 clamp on tuner.
I have a Pickboy tuner, manufactured by Seiko/Epson (I'm going from memory, I don't have the tuner handy) that I bought over 30 years ago.? At the time it was, as far as I know, the only electronic guitar tuner worth buying, at least of the "consumer" devices.? I had an A 440 fork, which I checked against an expensive and recently calibrated HP frequency counter.? My fork was dead on 440 Hz.? I? went to every music store in the greater Raleigh, NC area and checked every electronic tuner they had.? Any tuner that said my fork was off pitch was rejected, and if they had more than one tuner of the same model in stock, if any tuner of that model said my fork was off, that model was rejected.? I had gotten so sick of going to jam sessions and such where no two instruments were tuned to the same pitch, and so many of them weren't even in tune with themselves, that I decided I had to find something that actually worked.? And the arguments at jam sessions were ridiculous: "My instrument is right, because I am tuned to my electronic tuner."? Some tuners had a selector switch to select the note to be tuned, and they might be correct (or close to it) on one note, but not on others.? Some tuners varied unacceptably with ambient temperature, while others varied with battery voltage.? I have done a lot of electronic design, and many of the tuners I encountered over the years were so bad that if I were asked to design a tuner that worked so poorly, I'm not sure exactly how I would do it, and of course I would turn the assignment down.
Jim Allyn - N7JA