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First, thank you HKJ for the review.

I know this is an old thread but just wanted to add my thoughts. The 8145 has many of the problems of cheaper meters I am sure. For those who work with high voltages and high currents then this is not the device to use perhaps.

There are two AC classes for multimeters that I know of (and probably many more that I don’t), these are mains and audio. A mains meter needs to be good at high voltages and high currents. An audio meter by contrast needs better low-voltage measurement combined with audio bandwidth.

The 8145 was plainly designed by a real audio enthusiast. It handles proper audio-bandwidth RMS (as was mentioned in a post above and is fairly unusual). It can measure in dB. It even has selectable input impedance and so measures dBm - which is very unusual. It has good AC accuracy for low voltages (better than most) but great accuracy for audio bandwidths (very unusual). For example, it claims less than 3% error at 10mV. I know, that does not sound much but try and find a meter that equals it. Of the meters I have looked at so far, only the Fluke 287 can do it.

  • Fluke 287 = 2.2%
  • Vici 8145 = 2.6%
  • Mastech MS8050 / 8218 = 5.8%
  • Brymen 869s = 7%
  • UNI-T UT61E = 13%
  • UNI-T UT171C = 19%
  • UNI-T UT171E = 72%

I am not sure that there are any other meters with all these audio features at anything like this price. New or second-hand. So, if you are a mains measurer, this is probably not your meter but if you work with audio then you will find that this is one choice from what equates to a very small pool.

I hope that all makes some kind of sense.