| Several thoughts
I have 3 or 4 spectrum analyzers and use them a lot building hi fi equipment, and treating my rooms, etc.
1) They all work basically the same way using "buckets" and fft. The only real difference between the softwares are the features and the UI. In today's world even an old computer has plenty of cycles for real time stereo in 5 hz buckets 20-20k.
2) If there are inaccuracies they will likely be the mic or the pre.
3) The most important features are hold time, signal generators with lots of flexibility, and ways to examine things over the time domain and freq domain at the same time. A lot depends on what you do. Its also nice to be able to "record" or use real time, and use hi res playback of recorded material where you can use as manay cycles as needed to do whatever job is needed.
4) My favorite for a quick read - and its free but you have to have rme converters - is rme digicheck. Its fast, reliable, clean, and has some great features for looking at inbound bit error rates etc.
5) For general purpose, my next favorite is Pioneer Hill Spectra plus. It has lots of nice displays, lots of flex on bucketing and algorithms (blackman, hamming, etc), distortion stats, phase, time domain, etc.
All the others I have (Waves, Samplituse FFT analyser, etc) have little issues that bug me but I won't get into them. I'll use the Samplitude analyzer when I am in a Samp track and just need to check something. |