Talk:Electronic tuner

How do they work?

How do electronic tuners work? That'd make a worthwhile section for this article. 128.230.72.70 (talk) 18:25, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Have tried to address this for both regular & strobe type devices. However, an electronic wizz person would be great to give us more info on the regular device's operation. Black Stripe (talk) 17:46, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Hi there, Can anyone help by tightening-up this article and getting some sources? Many thanks. Black Stripe (talk) 12:22, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

It would be nice to categorize tuners by the method employed to determine pitch: FFT, autocorrelation, analyzing zero-crossings, octave-spaced filters, etc. I've been wondering which system uses which method, and how fast and accurate each is. mahboud (talk) 20:33, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Peterson bias

I think that we've got wikiadvertising from Peterson going on in this article. Anyone else notice? 71.145.129.210 (talk) 03:02, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

The whole article tends toward a "how to choose the tuner best for you" commercial flavor. Retail prices show up all through the article, and in US$.

Agreed, but not entirely convinced that's a bad thing for a new reader. Dichotomy between scholarly dissertation and newcomer 'what is this beastie.' Deal. Bs27975 (talk) 16:21, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Agreed there is a Peterson bias, but that is probably a reflection of their / the market history. It should not be removed, should perhaps be better balanced, but the only real solution is to give equal time and detail to the other manufacturers. PlanetWaves and Sonic Research should be expanded. Bs27975 (talk) 16:21, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

No doubt that Peterson makes a high-end strobe tuner, which is worth mentioning, along with its application to complex tasks such as tuning the partials of a bell. If someone wants to scrutinize the history and see if it's truly a Peterson agent who has put all that there, or just a fan, go right ahead, but I think that might be wasted motion. The article does stand in serious need of cleanup, though. First off, I intend to dream up a way to lose "functionality" from that section header. There's a blatant piece of marketspeak if ever I saw one. __Just plain Bill (talk) 13:14, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Hi, I'm sorry, how is stating retail prices controversial. If there is praise for some tuners, or advertising propaganda used as if it is objective fact, fine, take it out. But retail prices, as long as they are accurate, are both objective and helpful for the reader to understand the way the market for different tuners is broken down into different segments. Joe or Jill bar-band guitarist in a tavern will probably have a $30 LED light tuner with a fairly approximate level of precision, an orchestral oboe player may have a $300 tuner with a needle and adjustable read time...a guitar tech for a touring hard rock band may have a $500 rack-mount tuner, and a luthier who makes fine jazz guitars may have a $1000 stroboscopic tuner. If you didn't know about the electronic tuner world, and you didn't have the prices in the article, it would be harder to understand the range of different types.OnBeyondZebrax (talk) 02:35, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

The retail bit causes a reflection that the article is U.S. (North American) oriented, which may be the bias being referred to. Not so much a complaint as an observation. Bs27975 (talk) 16:21, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

One aspect missing from the discussion of electronic strobe tuners is that, as far as I know, only the Sonic Research units (vs. Peterson or PlanetWaves) provide for input of custom string sequences. So, for example, an autoharpist, with 36 strings and the lowest octave not consisting of all 12 notes, can program in their strings. With note auto-sensing in these units, thus, when tuning the low F, when F# is not present, the unit will not show F#. It will only ever show G being flat, or F being sharp. For different instruments, this convenience can be significant. Bs27975 (talk) 16:21, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Also, IIRC, I do not see mention that a significant advantage of electronic strobe tuners, here, is speed of note acquisition. The sound of a plucked string decays. It usually takes many such plucks before one considers the note sufficiently tuned. With faster note acquisition, less plucks are needed - as the number of strings to be tuned increases, the greater the decrease in tuning time required, as a result of this reduction in time to note acquisition. Bs27975 (talk) 16:21, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Buzz Feiten link

This external link looks like an ad for a guitar tuning system installation. Testimonials, price, marketing blurb, but very little about the system itself, about what it does, how it does it, what its pros and cons are with respect to other tuning systems. I'll leave it standing for the moment, but I'd like to see some valid reasons for keeping it here. __Just plain Bill (talk) 19:53, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Tuner Accuracy

Someone needs to explain precisely why strobe tuners are the most accurate. A necessary input to the heart of the "circuitry for detecting pitch" must be a frequency reference of some sort. This could be a tuning fork, a quartz crystal oscillator, or an atomic standard. Without a reference, there would be no tuner. Therefore, it comes down to the accuracy of the reference and not the means to display the frequency error. While it may be true that strobe tuners contain better references, that is not stated anywhere and needs to be clarified. The statement "work in a different way to regular electronic tuners" needs to be expanded. If it is the mechanical nature of the strobe tuner that sets it apart, then a PC based tuner cannot be in this section. If the discs are driven by gears, then the relative pitch can never be adjusted from this rational number. Strobe tuners simply resolve the frequency and display the measurement differently. To be more specific about the components of any tuner, there is an input signal, a frequency reference, a frequency comparison device, and a display of sorts. Tuners that allow custom pitch simply provide for non-standard frequency requirements, but the functionality of the device has not changed.

In one spot, "The accuracy of the tuner is only limited by the internal frequency generator." But then later on, it appears that there is an accuracy limitation "keeping the motor that spins the disc at the correct speed". So, are they accurate or not? If the motor is locked to a reference, then it keeps its speed correct automatically. Cam Finnigan (talk) 01:01, 19 September 2010 (UTC)

The main difference between strobe and other tuners is the visual nature of the display. Using a strobe tuner, "detecting pitch" is done by the human eye (and the wetware signal processing behind it) which is more sensitive to slow (apparent) movement than it is to small deviations of a meter needle. There may also be advantages related to the noise rejection capability of that wetware, when given an optical version of the audio input, amplified and clipped. I don't have any source for this other than my intuition and experience using the 1960s-era Conn tuners, which amount to a neon bulb, driven by the audio, behind a single spinning disc marked for various octaves. Variable audio gain was the only electronic signal processing available, or needed. __ Just plain Bill (talk) 02:39, 19 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your quick reply I completely buy into your explanation. Essentially, you are describing a "phase detector" compared to a "frequency detector". Frequency error is related to the rate of change of phase. If the phase error is stable, there is no frequency error [this is commonly used in vector signal analysis]. This strobe display can also be done electronically, and quite easily. My initial point is that the ability to display this error is a separate matter from the systematic error of the tool. The best tool accuracy is derived from the usage of the most accurate frequency reference. A crystal oscillator would easily provide 50 parts per million, about a tenth of a cent. The best display would be one which resolves phase error. The described tuner could be realised with mechanical or electronic parts and presumably give very similar results. Cam Finnigan (talk) 03:54, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

I don't know who claimed that strobe tuners are the "most accurate," and I don't know why or when, but strobe tuners these days are mainly used by piano technicians. Tuning a piano is much more complicated than just turning a knob until the tuner indicates the "correct" pitch. Each hammer in a piano strikes a cluster of two or three strings, and each of the strings in a cluster is tuned slightly differently from the others to achieve a desirable timbre and sustain characteristics. I have not personally tuned pianos, but I know that a professional piano technician sees more in the stroboscopic display than simply whether or not the note is 'in tune.' 173.75.33.51 (talk) 20:02, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

It would be interesting to know, if possible, just how accurate tuning by ear is. Assuming the oboist at the symphony orchestra produces an accurate A, exactly 440 or whatever standard being used, how closely do the string players tune to this? Or alternatively, how closely can a guitarist, for example, tune to a tuning fork? Wschart (talk) 18:04, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Intellitouch Tuner Advertising

The Intellitouch section of this article read like an advertisement for that particular brand, probably copied word-for-word from their corporate website. It used many subjective terms like "easy to use" and "better than" which have no place in an encyclopedia entry. It offered little to no contribution to the understanding of what an instrument tuner is or how it works.

If anyone is particularly passionate about this tuner deserving a separate mention for it's attached-to-the-headstock form factor, then (s)he should spend a little time to integrate it properly into the rest of the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.52.130.30 (talk) 18:13, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

I have condensed the section in question down to two simple paragraphs, talking about clip-on tuners in general. I also moved it higher up in the article, under the section on Types of tuners. Thanks for pointing out the advertising/promotional problem. ~Adjwilley (talk) 18:55, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Earlier Fully Digital Tuner (1975)

In 1975, Ted David, at the time an electronics technician with Scope Electronics in Reston Virginia, created what is thought to be the world's fIrst digital tuner. A top octave generator chip provided pitch references at an octave given by a divided version of this reference. A hard-limited audio input traversed a 16 stage shift register at the reference rate. Each shift register stages output drove one of 16 LED in a line which created a moving strobe. The lit LEDs moved to the left if the instrument was flat, to the right if it was sharp. The tuner was used by a local band for about five years, then retired. The device still exists. TDinDC (talk) 13:20, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

We would need a secondary source (something like a history book) to write about that. The claim of invention already in the article had the same issue, so I removed it. - MrOllie (talk) 13:37, 2 February 2022 (UTC)