Talk:Electronic tuner

message: 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)
thread_title:  How do they work? 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Buzz Feiten link 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)

text: 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)
thread_title:  Tuner Accuracy 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Intellitouch Tuner Advertising 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Earlier Fully Digital Tuner (1975)