Sorry I'm a little long between posts here, but I wanted to make sure I got as many opinions and thought about what I was trying to say as much as possible before I got back to y'all here on the board.
The reason I'm so conflicted is that I'm having an exceptionally difficult time determining the value of this instrument. It's got a lot of excellent features all rolled into one unit, some of which apply more to live sound than others.
For instance, it's got an excellent polarity checker. If you need a mobile unit to check polarity for a bunch of speakers, this is a great option. It's also got a cable tester, signal level meter and an audio scope... but it's not anywhere near as capable as, say, a Minilyzer in that regard. It's got a tone generator that's well put together, but because it's attached to a fairly large box it's of limited utility... I'll still be carrying a separate tone gen for use in the field.
There's TDA and soon-to-be-implemented Transfer Function and Energy/Time graph, and while the built in tools are certainly useful for basic confirmation and troubleshooting, they're not anywhere near the capability of Smaart (or TEF, I'm told), so I've still got to carry that. The RTA feature is nice, but not anything different from what I've already got in a $300 handheld unit. There's an easy to use impedance meter that saves me having to wire one up for Smaart, so that's a nice addition. The sound Study graph is also useful, but the stock microphone isn't accurate enough "for court", so if you needed that function you'd have to purchase the precision mic from Sencore.
For Live Sound use, which I keep coming back to seeing as this is a live sound forum, the Sencore SP395 does very little that I can't do already. For serious measurement I have to set up Smaart or equivalent anyway. The SP395 comes calibrated, which is very nice, but I can get a microphone calibrator that will let me do the same thing with my Smaart rig for $500 or so. It certainly takes the cake in the pick it up, walk on stage, and confirm your monitors aren't blown department. Again, though, I can get 95% of that functionality with a sweeping tone gen I own and a $300 handheld RTA I own. That extra 5% of usefulness certainly isn't worth the additional cost.
What I'm really getting at here is what I had a problem with at the beginning. For a unit that costs about the same as two entire Smaart rigs, I simply don't see enough benefit in the live sound field to justify the price. It's got a number of "fringe" features that are useful enough to make it attractive, but at $4,000 loaded I can buy a handful of other tools that are on their own more capable, with the only detriment being they're not all in one box.
It's not all bad, of course. I think for someone doing large installs or system troubleshooting on a regular basis the Sencore SP395 makes a lot of sense. It's got speech intelligibility and noise analysis and many different kinds of decay. It's got a built in tone generator and speaker for confirming what's going down your signal lines. If you're an install company and you need one box that you can send a tech out with to crawl around in the ceiling and figure out why such and such speaker system isn't working or performing as expected, there's not really anything else on the market that does as much in one physical unit as the Sencore. It does just enough of everything to be a great tool when you need to grab one thing and have a whole slew of functions available for you.
I just don't see how, for the price, it has a realistic benefit to someone working mainly in the live sound field. Were it $2,000, fully loaded, I'd probably think it was just expensive but probably worth the price to A level touring system engineers. At $4,000 though I can buy an armful of products that will do everything I could possibly need while out there in the trenches, and do it better for my needs than the Sencore unit I've been reviewing.
I would love, however, to hear some other opinions. It has been suggested by a few influential people that I'm looking at this with my head screwed on wrong, which is why I've taken so long to get this last post in. After much discussion with outside parties, however, I think I've come to a reasonable conclusion. I just hate to take this product that John Olsen from Sencore was so kind to send to me to evaluate and say that it's got no application to this section of the industry unless you're independently wealthy or can get your company to buy one for you, and even then you still need something like Smaart.
Barring any sudden revelations, I think I've probably got enough hands on time. Would anyone else like to play? I'd be happy to UPS it out to someone who thinks they'd be able to clock some hours on it and kick the tires.