u/mingsir2023

I've been digging into phone-based SPL and spectrum measurement and keep running into the same split: SPLnFFT has the strongest accuracy reputation (it even shows up in occupational-health references), but the UI is rough and hasn't been updated since ~2023. Decibel X is far more polished, but I keep seeing its accuracy questioned.

For those who do real measurement work — when you reach for a phone instead of a proper meter or REW rig, what do you actually trust? Is that "accurate but clunky vs pretty but imprecise" split real, or is there something in between I'm missing?

(Background: I'm weighing whether a modern, accuracy-first measurement app would be worth building, so I'm trying to learn what people actually rely on — nothing to sell, no app, just gauging whether there's a real gap.)

Not a CNC owner myself — I've been going down a rabbit hole reading about desktop CNC, and kept noticing the same thing: people say tools like FSWizard and most online feed/speed calculators are built around industrial-rigidity machines, so the numbers come out too aggressive for a lighter Shapeoko-class setup.

Is that actually true in practice for you? Do you trust the calculator numbers, back them off by some gut-feel percentage, or just hand-tune from experience? Genuinely trying to understand how much of this is "the tools don't fit hobby machines" vs "you just learn your machine over time."