I use a Fluke 175 as the every day meter, I've left this thing in the rain overnight (by accident) and it was fine. Agilent's stuff is fantastic but Fluke have lower price points - its up to you what you'd like to spend.
For scopes, I use an early 100MHZ HP 54600B that was £130 from ebay - nice scope but not state of the art by any means - it does most of what we need. Look to better this, but please don't spend more than 3x more!
One of the most powerful tools you can get is something that will give you a distortion spectrum - an FFT reading - we might call this our audio analyser. See some of my threads for how this works - what your are after here is finding how much noise there is in your amp, how much distortion etc also doing swept freq measurement etc - you can also measure speakers too if you have a decent microphone.
The ATEST box and HP8903 are my main stays in audio analyser arena. The ATEST does everything an HP8903 does and more. The ATEST uses a a quality commodity sound card and lacks for nothing for what we need, you just need to protect the sound card from HT/DC etc- that's what the ATEST does. The sound card will give you a decent sig gen too and the ATEST will allow you to drive all loads without fear of damaging the card. A decent sound card should have specs in the >-100db THD range for both in and out - you will pay big money for a sig gen that can better a £160 sound card 'at audio freq'. You have to ask why you would need more than 20Hz to 100kHz most of the time - they don't. Its a numbers game! How can test equipment vendors compete with the massive sales volumes of the PC market, the answer is they compete by working in the VHF/UHF/radio space and above etc, they aren't really interested in audio freq, so.... buy a decent sound card, look for 24bit.192kHz. I recommend the EMU sound cards; they are balanced too. An ATEST should set you back a few hundred, given most folk already have a decent PC to hold the PCIe card its a no brainer.
If you have any pocket money left. trawl e-bay for working/tested/verified DC bench supply or two and a decent LCR meter - like a Wayne Kerr or a older bridge style - I use a Maplin Gold Digtal LCR,
cost me £25 - would you believe it agrees with Nick's much superior Wayne Kerr meter pretty closely - at some point Maplin must have known their stuff (again HP/Agilent/Keithley/NI are great but very expensive).
What I use most are the Fluke 175 and the DC supplies then the ATEST/HP8903, then my scope and stand alone sig gen. The Maplin LCR gets a good look in too.
Get some big heat sinks and some large wattage resistors to act as dummy loads and 'speakers', so you can test stuff without blowing up anything that matters. If your feeling really flush there such as thing as a electronic load, but a big lump of metal and a big resistor does just fine.
In future, I would like a component tester like this..
http://uk.farnell.com/peak-electronic-d ... dp/3727476
and a valve tester like the uTracer that Paul has.
Don't be too afraid of second hand stuff on eBay, test equipment is generally very well made, buy wisely and it will hold its value, if the vendor can prove its OK then it should be fine.
Andrew
Analogue, the lost world that lies between 0 and 1.
