Depends upon exactly what is meant by "analog" vs "digital". If it's just a matter of whether the display (only) is solid state vs CRT, it means almost nothing.
A true digital scope can mean several levels of capability. Storage of waveforms; Triggered storage of waveforms; precise measurement of risetimes and x-axis (eg; time) offsets; much better capability to measure and display jitter; capture, store, and display spurious events that happen only once in a (relatively great) while. I suppose one could really bend their brain to utilize some of the advanced features of a digi-scope but those uses are pretty far off into the ephemeral.
Another potential meaning of "digital" might be that the deflections you see onscreen are the result of A/D converters and NOT analog amplifiers.
Still another meaning might be on-screen display(s) of your current settings of volts/div and sweep times. That's danged nice to have if you are taking pictures, and, speaking of taking pictures, some digital scopes can drive a printer directly to print out what's on-screen, or can "print to disk" to save same.
None of those things are particularly salient to tube-based audio and really anything operating at audio frequencies. It's nice to have minimally a dual-trace scope, and frankly I wouldn't buy a non dual-trace scope. Indeed, the more sophisticated a scope, the more likely you are to have to buy REALLY expensive probes (unless they come with) with eentsy little clip-on dealies that you actually end up breaking by working on tube stuff. At the same time, most probes for 1950's-1960's scopes are like hanging a kielbasa off a component and are cumbersome to poke into compact circtuitry. Not everything is built on a turret board. The point being, if you're paying big bucks for really, really elegant surface-mount probe tips and attachments, those aren't going to do you a bit of good on a 5E3.
The one good thing about scopes for audio is that you can use just about the worst one you can find. (Well...OK, I have a 1952 DuMont 304 scope (Google images) from thegarage of doom that is worth whatever the 3 qty 12AU7's inside are worth) It would nice to have a slick Tektronix scope, say a 2215 - 2245 (there are about 6 models in there) but that $120 Tek scope you buy is gonna cost you dead minimum $500 to fix if you ever need to fix it. I recently bought a Kenwood scope for $140 delivered which I'm pretty happy with, but isn't anything miraculous. I see no reason at all why one would need to spend over $100 on a used scope for audio work. Just be aware that probes can cost and there's nothing worse than intermittent, bad condition scope probes. You can buy import probes for under $15. Real Tek probes are usually in the $100 range all by themselves.
Topic: How is an analog scope better than a digital scope? (Read 7228 times)