# A good affordable watch timing machine



## Roy (Feb 23, 2003)

http://www.bmumford.com/mset/specs.html

I may get one of these , as if I do not have enough.


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## DavidH (Feb 24, 2003)

Since when did that stop us.


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## JayGee (Feb 26, 2003)

Hmmm that's set me thinking...

Just out of curiosity I tried sitting the stylus of my record deck on the back of a wristwatch recently and sure enough you could hear it ticking away quite nicely through the speakers (I'm guessing that the sound of a wristwatch dosn't have enough of a low frequency component for the RIAA equalisation to have a significant effect).

Now, I just happen to have a PC permanently plumbed into the Hi-Fi, so let's say I capture a good length (I can digitise anything up to about 8 hours of stereo at a sampling rate of 44.1 KHz before I have to start worrying about disk space, you can double that straight away because there's no point in using stereo, and then I suspect I'd be able to get away with sampling rates a lot lower than that...) sample of a watches "sound signature"...

For starters the sound recording app I use at the moment will (assuming I can persuade it to recognise the individual "ticks" as drum beats) immediately calculate a beat rate (the BPM value that's so critical to dance music artists and DJs who want their sets to flow nicely), and can also do some simple frequency domain analysis that *might *reveal further information (certainly cyclic effects should show up) to the informed observer.

And that's just a start, if I knock something up to extract data from the .wav, spot the ticks and write out a series of rate "snapshots" to another file as (say) comma seperated decimal values I could pull it into an excel spreadsheet (or alternatively I could code something up myself once I knew the sort of patterns I was looking for) that would be able to do *much* more powerful analysis to show (for instance) long-term drift and/or the "shape" of cyclic variations!

OK, so for a working watch/clock maker/repairer a horrid clumsy cludge like the above isn't ever going to hack it as a day to day tool, but for those of us who are just vaguely curious, already have the hardware to hand, and just feel like finding out what our favourite (or otherwise!) watches are doing or getting a quick and dirty picture of how well a new acquisition is running this could be interesting...

Plus of course their's the potential for going seriously anorak and boring people rigid "Here's what a Longines Ultrachron sounds like, now compare that with this which is a Poljot 3133 with the chrono running..." - It could be a great way of getting rid of unwanted guests









Watch this space...

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JG


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