T Tocas Professional USB Digital LCD Sound Pressure Level Meter 30 ~ 130 dB Decibel Audio Noise Measurement Detectors Logger With 512M SD Memory Card

This is the same meter that various sellers claim as their own. It's actually made by Wensen, a Chinese company, and it's a WS1361C.There are two main issues with this meter, no matter who you get it from, plus see my update below.1) the driver is unsigned. This is a real pain under Win8, but surmountable. There are plenty of descriptions online about how to install an unsigned driver. Google is your friend.2) the 'documentation', as they call it, is woefully inadequate. For example, no description of how to disable auto-poweroff. (Hold the power button down for 3 or so secs when turning it on. The display will flash 3 times, you're all set. I later found that this is described in the documentation, but only in the Word version, not in the PDF version. Go figure.) No indication as to how to set the date/time. Turns out you do it via the program provided. Etc.On the plus side, it's cheap for a recording meter, and it's actually quite accurate. I compared it to a professional sound meter, and checked its calibration against a standard. Dead on at 1KHz/114db.It has both AC and DC signal outputs. Some have reported the DC output doesn't work, haven't tried it yet but I'll update when I do. The AC output is fine, I used it to drive my HP/Agilent spectrum analyzer, no problem.If you want to do long-term recording, it can be powered via a standard 5volt USB supply, good for 24 hour recording sessions.Update 6/15/15 - I've had a chance to use this a lot, including one 24 hr recording session.The good news: it works fine, I used a USB wall-wart to power it, no problem. A 24 hr recording was about 340K. Given the 512MB SD card, you can record almost 4 years continuously before you fill it up.The bad news: the software is virtually useless. Sets the time and date nicely. Otherwise, it doesn't seem to be able to handle anything but short recordings. Totally flaky with my 24 hr recording. Can't even read it from the meter. Fortunately, you can just take out the SD card and read the files on your PC. The software will then open it. But, it only displays part of the graph and takes forever to load. Fortunately again, you can export the data, which is complete, into a txt file or an Excel file. Just be patient. You might think it crashed. Wait a while. A good while. It might actually finish. If not, close and try again. I'm not too irritated, this is typical half-baked Chinese stuff. I've written a nice graphing and analysis package for another use, it will do just fine for analyzing this stuff.

EDIT 2:The Windows software is defective. In every case, on both Windows 7 and Windows 10 (both of which are an ordeal to install…) when one clicks on the “SD card operation” icon the result is inevitably an alert announcing “Division by zero.”Also, if the device is set to record and left for an extended period (several hours, but less than a day), the unit locks up and the only way to restore it to normal function is to remove all power (USB and batteries).If this device worked in any way as advertised, it would be a good deal. As it is, it’s junk.-==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==-EDIT: In case anyone else encounters the same thing I did… The included microSD card is installed in the card port of the device out of the box! I went to install one of my own, thinking the supposedly included one was AWOL and discovered it was there all along!-==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==-The product description clearly states that a 512 MB microSD card is included, but there was none included with the delivered product.Additionally, not all ordinary AA cells fit in the battery compartment–some will resist having the 4th cell inserted and / or pop out even when the door to the battery compartment is in place!Lastly, and though it is not technically malfunction, it can take so long for the unit to start up that one would be excused from thinking the unit delivered was DOA…

Seems to work ok, but can't connect to computer Windows 8.1 says the install files lack digital signature information. Went to MF site looking for help and got locked out of site when I tried to post a message. Thumbs down.UPDATE ***Seller got in contact with me, sending updated instructions on how to disable driver signature enforcement. Sadly, their instructions were for an older version of Windows still, but this was enough to send me looking for more info on how to and why I might disable driver signature enforcement. I found that at least some people think that enforcing signatures is not necessary, but they do admit it can decrease your computer's security. I decided to go for it anyway and followed instructions for disabling Windows 8.1 driver signature enforcement here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmw86KplqmUAfter I did that I updated the driver in device manager, and voila, it works just fine and my computer didn't explode. So, if you are comfortable making these adjustments, this seems to be a great deal at this price.

This device will record noise for 5 minutes and allow you to pull the data out using the terrible proprietary SoundLink software. Any more than that and the software will crash.I bought 6 of these to do a multi day noise analysis where the devices stayed in rooms and the data was going to be exported to our timeseries database. That couldn't work though because any but the tiniest of files can be opened.You will see some comments that transferring the files to your computer and opening them from there might help and it does. You will be able to open slightly bigger files. Having a half gig SD card is only useful if you can store data for long period and you really cant so the storage is useless.Don't be cheap like I was. Buy a real device from a real company if you want to do more than a tiny bit of data collection.

It came without any plastic wrap, the LCD plastic window i snot fully glued down, no instruction manual, no software disk. That said, it works, and from what I've read, the software doesn't seem worth the effort.

She's big, but its very accurate. Ive seen these with a different name on them for 3x the price. This is the OEM version whereas others are branded. Save your money and pick one of these up versus the same unit at $160 elsewhere