03-14-2015, 09:26 AM
Well, a vintage audio generator that'll give you sine, square, etc is nice to have, usually only a few bucks at meets, etc... Bet someone here has a spare to gift or let go for postage, I only have one, an ancient Heathkit. I also have a distortion analyzer that I never figured out how to use.
And some non inductive power resistors, or even a mess of wirewounds series/paralleled to give you, say 4 or 8 ohms to act as load whilst testing. I wouldn't hook up any speakers you want to keep whilst poking around.
As stated, you can read output wattage and just about any working scope will show you the shape of the output (and compare it to input) so you can see clipping. You can confirm waveform is good at input then go stage by stage to output to see if there is an intermediate point of distortion, or proceed backwards from output to input, (well, I was taught to start with the speaker and go backwards to the antenna to fix radios after determining there was light and B+, way back when.)
And some non inductive power resistors, or even a mess of wirewounds series/paralleled to give you, say 4 or 8 ohms to act as load whilst testing. I wouldn't hook up any speakers you want to keep whilst poking around.
As stated, you can read output wattage and just about any working scope will show you the shape of the output (and compare it to input) so you can see clipping. You can confirm waveform is good at input then go stage by stage to output to see if there is an intermediate point of distortion, or proceed backwards from output to input, (well, I was taught to start with the speaker and go backwards to the antenna to fix radios after determining there was light and B+, way back when.)
