Tascam DP24-SD Noise Measurements

Oct 31, 2020
This article provides accurate voltage noise measurements of the Tascam DP-24SD recorder and is an update to a previous article. The noise measurements are for:
Noise measurements were performed by connecting each Tascam output to a very low noise 60dB amplifier and filtered with a 20kHz bandwidth 5th order sharp cutoff filter and then A-Weighted following standard audio specifications. The filtered integrated noise voltages were measured using a carefully calibrated X-Fi Elite Pro 24bit/96kHz sampling sound card along with an rms sampling utility WaveMon. The noise voltages were also measured using a 10MHz Analog Discovery scope.

Setup



Results

The noise measuements listed below are the measured amplified values divided by 1000 (60dB midband amp gain). These are the total noise values at the outputs of the DP24-SD within the noise bandwidth of each measurement. The 60dB amp noise floor was measured without the DP-24SD connected to the amp and shorting the amp input. It is much lower than the noise levels at the DP-24SD outputs and doesn't affect the measurement values:
Tascam DP24-SD RMS Noise Voltage Measurements
Measurement60dB Amp ~ 46kHz NBW20 kHz LPF 20 kHz LPF & A-Weight
Stereo Out 20 µV 14 µV 11 µV
Monitor Out 51 µV 34 µV 26 µV
Headphone Out (into 51Ω) 120 µV 81 µV 63 µV
60dB Amp Noise Floor (shorted input) 0.64 µV 0.46 µV

Detailed Results

The screen shots below show the measurements for the 20kHz LPF measurements. The rms voltages measured with the X-Fi Elite Pro sound card and WaveMon are in agreement with the rms voltages reported with the Analog Discovery oscilloscope.

Stereo Out



Monitor Out



Headphone Out (51 Ω loads)