Sonic beacon is a PC-based test and measurement system for the testing of loudspeakers and other electro-acoustic products using commercially available Windows multimedia sound cards. Sonic beacon will perform impedance, frequency and phase response, harmonic and inter-modulation distortion, polarity, sensitivity and SPL as well as other FFT and real time analysis tests. Sixteen bit sampling rates up to 192 kHz and FFT lengths up to 128K points are supported. Sonic beacon contains six virtual instruments that can be cascaded in order to form a process. An input signal emanating from a WAVE audio file, the Signal generator or a sound card may be passed serially from one module to another. Each module performs a process on this signal and alters its time or frequency domain representation. If the modules are coherently cascaded a sensible analysis can be done on the input signal.