Is an RTA worth owning or better to rent/borrow?

[Rodney Gene]

Is a necessity to keep around on a regular basis?
I need to analyze my control room and am curious if anyone considers a RTA a studio essential worth buying? I can borrow one from another studio as another choice.

Thank you again.

[LTA]

Depends on how much you use it In a single studio environment, i'd say it would be a little much to get one, unless you anticipated loaning/renting it out on occasion. If you find you need it so often that borrowing/renting one gets to be a hastle, buy one. You might be able to get by with a plugin rta too.

[Ethan Winer]

Rodney,

You don't need an expensive hardware analyzer. The ETF program I use costs only $150 from www.acoustisoft.com and that's a pretty small investment. The advantage of buying is you can use it whenever you want to experiment in the future.

--Ethan

[enharmonic]

Why not look into spectrafoo...you can do RTA and so much more with it, and it won't break the bank

[pounce]

spectra foo is a great answer. i'm going to dedicate my old dual g4 to cd burning and running spectra foo all the time. kinda helpful, and the clients will love the visual. i'll just send a mult off of the two buss to the spectra foo box so i can keep it monitoring whatever i'm working on.

[Rodney Gene]

Thanks all!

I will look at spectrafoo and acousticsoft.
I have a small control room which also does double duty for alot of tracking (vox and acoustic). I have avoided a PC in there for noise issues but I suppose it can be temporary. Thanks again!

[Albert]

Never thought I'd hear myself recommending Behringer gear, but they make a neat little RTA/metering device called the DEQ2496. It's their "mastering" processor, but it has a good metering and RTA section. I keep it on all the time, as once you get used to having that metering you miss it when it's not there. I paid $299 for the DEQ2496, and feel the money was worth it.

I don't run signal through it though, just feed it the mix for the metering.