Peterson StroboPlus HD Web Site

The StroboPlus HD is really an amazing tuner! It's a major step up from the StroboFlip in many ways. The strobe screen is much larger and brighter. The strobe has two concentric semi-circles which IMHO is a lot simpler to read that the old StroboFlip's 4 vertical strobe bars. The tuner locks in fast and if your instrument's pitch is stable, the bars settle quickly and stay put. I used this to tune my 5 string fiddle, 4 string bass guitar, 6 string Telecaster electric, 6 string Ovation acoustic (unplugged and using the StroboPlus HD built in mic) and my 10 string MSA Legend pedal steel guitar (E9th only so far). In every case it tuned faster and was easier than the StroboFlip to interpret the readout. Keep in mind that the StroboFlip is quite a great tuner but this one is just that much better. I used the built in tuning sweeteners in all cases. For pedal steel E9th I used SE9 for the open tuning and SP9 for the pedals. I was prepared to detune the fiddle 9 cents, detune the bass guitar a bit and customize the pedal steel settings until I found that all the instruments played in tune nicely with each other using the built in settings. I am pretty fussy about tuning but found that with the usual amount of care, the stock tunings worked great. The "usual amount of care" includes tuning the 6 string guitar string, bending it a bit, retuning it again etc. for get the slippage over the nut where it would be after a few bends during normal play. For the pedal steel it includes tuning a string, bouncing the pedal that raises or lowers the string. then retuning it until it is tuned to pitch after a normal pedal/ knee lever cycle.

I had a chance to try and return a Sonic Research Turbo Tuner for 7 days prior to using the StroboPlus HD. The Sonic is more compact and also features the ability to have multiple settings for the same pitch within the same sweetener. So the 1st string open F# can be set to a different pitch that the F# obtained on the E9th string 4 by activating the 3rd floor pedal. Overall I prefer the StroboPlus HD over the Sonic. The StroboPlus HD has the USB port for upgrades, charging and downloading/ uploading tunings which the Sonic lacks. The Strobo Plus also has a bigger, more stable display and costs about $50 less at this point in time.

There are a few minor flaws with the StroboPlus HD that are not really a big deal. I found that the standard USB plugs on my Samsung home and car chargers did not fit the tuner's jacks very well. They are pretty much standard cords that work with all my devices but they don't stay seated in the tuner's jack very well. You can see in the pics below that the USB cord that comes with the Strobo has a longer metal connector on the tuner side. It's snout measures 0.300" so it's a bit longer than most cell phone connectors when it comes to depth of insertion. The Samsung home charger USB cord has a 0.200" snout and the Samsung car charger snout measures 0.225". The length of the StoboPlus HD USB cord is a bit short for my liking as well. It's about 32.5" long whereas the Samsung AC charger cord is 58.5" long and the standard Ipod cord (a popular cord that uses a different device connector but included for reference) is about 40.5" long. See the cord comparison picture below with the Strobo cord connector on the left. Another minor gripe is that the Mode, Start, Preset etc keys are not backlit or highlighted in any way (such as white paint text) or otherwise denoted on the screen above. They are impossible to see except in fairly bright direct lighting. This will become a very minor thing, I believe, once I get the key functions memorized. One last small annoyance would be that having to hold the ON/OFF key for two seconds is about twice as long as is needed and it seems like forever after you use it a few times. Perhaps a microcode fix to trim that back to 1 second?