Audio Precision Portable One Plus

Hi, Guys. Merry pre-christmas. I haven't been on the forum since I started working on my book, but now that it's out I'll at least be lurking!

I'm thinking of buying a Portable One Plus. There's two on Ebay for $3250 from a power seller that deals in refurbished test gear. They also offer calibration for about $350. Do you think that's a good price?

I've used one that's owned by a friend, several times and I like its ease of use and power and now I'd like one of my own. I've got an email into AP to ask how much the upgrade to dual domain would cost. The only down side that I've found with this unit is it only has a parallel port which makes it awful hard to get its output into the computer for analysis or publication or emailing or for later printing as it is not very convenient to feed my printer which is going to be in some other room normally connected by Ethernet (which the AP does not have). Does anyone know any tricks which extracts the graphics information from a parallel port with PCL protocol? Or is GPIB the trick (Which I know next to nothing about).

Thanks,

BK

We have a Portable One Plus dual domain at work and I love it. I believe we paid a lot more than that... Then again, it's like-new, calibrated and under warranty.

As for your last question, I'd like to know the answer to that one myself! I haven't printed out/captured any plots yet, but soon enough I'm going to want to capture the data.

Bob,
Beware the no feedback of "cmfluteguy"

I believe the TekNet seller offers the cal.

I buy lots of stuff through ebay.....and bought from TekNet.
I had no complaints, great service. I have not used their cal service though.

I would think at that price, a phone call to their tech dept. would be a good idea. You could get some idea of whether or not they are familiar with the unit....or to see if they "speak the language of intelligence" ..if you will.

With gear that matters, I'll avoid the cheap sellers (better deals), so I'm more confident about it's functionality.

I've never tried it, but I don't see why you couldn't have it sent directly to another calibration place you might be more familiar with. (??)

I always try to get a manual prior to receiving the unit, so I can run any tests on it, before the seller's several-day "non-DOA"guarantee runs out.

-good luck.

=FB=

I bought an AP portable from Teknet in a recent ebay auction and am very happy with it. It was $3000 which seemed like a great price. I've seen them go for much more on ebay. Teknet seems to have gotten several of these for sale.

The Plus has the AES and SPDIF card. Mine doesn't, but I wish it did and it would be well worth the extra bucks.

I say it's a great deal and a great instrument, go for it!

[quote author="NewYorkDave"]We have a Portable One Plus dual domain at work and I love it. I believe we paid a lot more than that... Then again, it's like-new, calibrated and under warranty.

As for your last question, I'd like to know the answer to that one myself! I haven't printed out/captured any plots yet, but soon enough I'm going to want to capture the data.[/quote]

Did you buy it used? You paid more than 3250 because the unit I see at Ebay is the analog one and I want to see what my net costs would be after the upgrade.

[quote author="David Kulka"]I bought an AP portable from Teknet in a recent ebay auction and am very happy with it. It was $3000 which seemed like a great price. I've seen them go for much more on ebay. Teknet seems to have gotten several of these for sale.

The Plus has the AES and SPDIF card. Mine doesn't, but I wish it did and it would be well worth the extra bucks.

I say it's a great deal and a great instrument, go for it![/quote]

Good to know you think the price is right.

But to my knowledge, neither the Plus nor the regular Portable one has the digital I/O. You have to go "Dual Domain" to get that.

[quote author="peter purpose"]Bob,
Beware the no feedback of "cmfluteguy"[/quote]

He's a scammer, right? These two AP units are being offered by Technet, which gets a big thumbs up so far.

[quote author="bobkatz"]
Did you buy it used? [/quote]

Yes, we bought it used, calibrated by AP, with a warranty.

I don't remember the name of the dealer but I can check when I'm back at work.

your two choices are either to buy an older printer with a parallel port to dedicate to your AP and settle for just reading printouts, or to go with a GPIB setup.

for GPIB to work, you need a computer with the special IEEE488 port (cards are available and not too expensive, check with AP for driver compatibility), and LabVIEW software to control the AP via GPIB. you can't use the standard AP software via GPIB, to the best of my knowledge. LabVIEW is an interesting program and can do a lot more than just save/print the graphs.

here is the driver page for the older APs with GPIB for LabVIEW:

http://archive.ap.com/index.php?page=products&id=1000000612

ed

[quote author="bobkatz"][quote author="David Kulka"]I bought an AP portable from Teknet in a recent ebay auction and am very happy with it. It was $3000 which seemed like a great price. I've seen them go for much more on ebay. Teknet seems to have gotten several of these for sale.

The Plus has the AES and SPDIF card. Mine doesn't, but I wish it did and it would be well worth the extra bucks.

I say it's a great deal and a great instrument, go for it![/quote]

Good to know you think the price is right.

But to my knowledge, neither the Plus nor the regular Portable one has the digital I/O. You have to go "Dual Domain" to get that.[/quote]

I think you're right...I was confused.

[quote author="bobkatz"]He's a scammer, right? [/quote]

I'd just be wary of high dollar items offered by someone with zero feedback.

[quote author="edanderson"]your two choices are either to buy an older printer with a parallel port to dedicate to your AP and settle for just reading printouts, or to go with a GPIB setup.

for GPIB to work, you need a computer with the special IEEE488 port (cards are available and not too expensive, check with AP for driver compatibility), and LabVIEW software to control the AP via GPIB. you can't use the standard AP software via GPIB, to the best of my knowledge. LabVIEW is an interesting program and can do a lot more than just save/print the graphs.

here is the driver page for the older APs with GPIB for LabVIEW:

http://archive.ap.com/index.php?page=products&id=1000000612

ed[/quote]

Thanks, Ed, for the info on Labview. Are there any GPIB-based programs that can work with Win XP? Or do real men only work in DOS .

labview is a winxp app:

http://www.ni.com/labview/

they have a trial version you can download.

ed

Ive been doing alot of test automation lately with Labview. there is a learning curve to it for sure. It is a graphical programming language. I think traditional text/subroutine based programming (C++, BASIC, Java, etc) is actually more intuitive. perhaps if you have never been exposed to programming, it would be easier, or make more sense, I dunno. it is good at managing several realtime processes and keeping multiple instruments sequenced and/or synced. Once you figure ut how to use the software it shouldn't take you too long to make a VI to just acquire data from the AP, but then you have a big array of numbers. you have to format it, and learn how to print, etc. Yeah, its powerful, but I haven't found any aspect of labview to be particularly straightforeward. the way I do it, I export raw data from labview, then import into Excel where I have a macro that sets up a formatted chart for printing/pdf export. IMO you may be better off hooking an older laser printer directly to the AP if you aren't generating loads and loads of data for archiving (production testing).

mike p

i should have indicated that AP provide a simple "soft front panel" app precompiled for LabVIEW that replicates most of the front panel functions of the portable one. i agree that if you want to do anything beyond look at and save single sweeps, there is a serious learning curve.

http://archive.ap.com/index.php?page=products&id=1000000613

ed

Why not buy a usb to parallel adapter?

[quote author="Cainester"]Why not buy a usb to parallel adapter?[/quote]

What if your audio precision is on the bench and your printer is on a wired Ethernet network somewhere in the next room?

I think the object would be to have a laptop that you could bring along with the AP and somehow print (via parallel, USB, etc.) it later.

Labview looks like a good app, a little above my budget right now. And in addition, thanks to the other poster, it looks like the GPIB drivers that AP provide are for Win 2K and earlier. I should talk to AP about this.

[quote author="Cainester"]Why not buy a usb to parallel adapter?[/quote]

That won't work. It's designed to connect a USB port to a printer's Centronics input port, not to a host (in this case, the AP) printer output port.

-a

I should jump back in here and say that the AP I bought from Teknet on ebay seems to have a calibration issue and I'm a little concerned about how they're going to handle it. When this is settled I'll post again and report how it turned out.