PC sound card for vibration analysis?

Sorry for not being able to answer your specific question. But I used to play with cheap analog to digital converters in home computers several years ago, before the joysticks were USB. The PC (and most sound cards) had a "joy port" that had four 0v-5vdc (two for each joystick) analog to digital converters. Tlthough not as fast as more expensive A-D sonverters, they were fairly fast. They were programmable in BASIC. The joysticks were supplied with voltage and provided a resistance of 0-250kohms.

The PC sound cards input an audio frequency analog signal. I am not sure but I think it is on the order of 1v peak to peak. They are also programmable in BASIC and most other programming languages. You may be able to find data graphing and analysis software in one of the shareware archives. I have used some shareware audio software to graph the signal.

Mitch

Mitch I negelect to mention that the vibrations I want to study are those of an acoustic guitar.

My son uses several electronic music composing packages, some of which have signal processing capabilities. He was able set up his laptop very quickly to measure the frequency of the tone of a spinning bearing so that I could correlate it with RPM. I don't recall how we got the signal into the laptop in that case, but he normally uses various USB devices to capture input. He has been talking recently about a firewire device to reduce latency. If this is sort of thing you're interested in, I can ask him for specifics.

Ned Simmons