USB and pocked sized digital oscilloscopes

Are USB / digital oscilloscopes generally usable for analog audio circuit designers / techs? Are they good enough? They seem very affordable (around 150USD to 400USD). If they are not good enough for us then what cheap oscilloscopes are currently available in the new or used market that get the job done?

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch then AudioTools puts a scope in your phone.  Wiring-up a stereo I/O connector costs almost as much as the software!
I am a traveling tech and not a designer, and the phone-scope gets me 75% of the way there.  I never go poking around tube equipment or anything HV with it, but it is very fast and perfect for measuring headroom and THD.
Mike

I have a velleman hand held scope I use in my portable toolkit, but at home I use an old style CRT scope.  The velleman is fine for most things, where you just want to see if a sine wave is there & undistorted, but at home I prefer to use my crt scope, it just better res.

However the Velleman scope has some useful dB displays that can be useful when tracing stuff .

http://shop.ebay.ca/?_from=R40&_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&_nkw=pocket+oscilloscope&_sacat=See-All-Categories

Thanks all for the useful information. When I first started searching for what oscilloscope I would want, it was years ago. It looked like most of my options were sort of up there in price ( from 200 USD - 800 USD ). Then I found out that old ones can be found for a pretty good price. The old ones seem to work fine too ( maybe even better ). A friend of mine showed me an old Tektronix one on Ebay and I bought it for 105 USD. It has two channels and and a fairly large screen but does not come with any leads. Where would you buy those? What is a fair price?

Now I need to find the right sine wave generator. I need it asap too. What generators do you suggest if I need a 0.0v-30.0v sine wave? I have gear built and it's time to start learning how to trouble shoot. I've gotten over the hump of learning about ordering parts, understanding part values.. and all that jazz.

From what I've seen it seems like most of the generators do not have balanced outputs. Is that something that should concern me? I don't think it entirely is at my stage in the game.

those will work okay for audio 20-20k frequencies... but if you're having parasitic oscillations in a tube amp, you're going to need something to measure up in the Mhz, that's where an older CRT comes in handy.

gemini86 said:

those will work okay for audio 20-20k frequencies... but if you're having parasitic oscillations in a tube amp, you're going to need something to measure up in the Mhz, that's where an older CRT comes in handy.

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Thats good to know. Thank you. I am experiencing problems with oscillations in a circuit currently and now I'm questioning if there was something that I was not seeing on the scope at the studio. Thought, it was good enough to figure out where the oscillations were and were not within the circuit. That seems to be the point right? 

A simple signal generator is something you can easily DIY http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=83930.0

I'm sure there's a bunch of simple DIY signal generator kits out there too. Simple google search for DIY signal generator or signal generator kit will give you a ton of results. I have a fairly feature filled signal generator that 99.9% of it's time stays set to 1V @ 1K...