Quantifying responsiveness?

[caj]

Good afternoon,

 

Now that I'm tweaking an electronic concertina, I am trying to judge objectively how it compares to my Crabb (or to other boxes I can get my hands on).   I've found myself alternating between the Crabb and the MIDI box, trying to play different passages.  This is complicated by the boxes having different button sizes and spacing, and it's hard for me to convince myself for certain that one of them is faster or cleaner.

 

I wonder if makers or dealers have any specific thing they do when comparing one box to another as sort of an A/B test, or to judge if a box has the response that it should.  What I've been doing, for example, is playing a "test pattern" against a metronome, and measuring how quickly I can play it so that the notes all sound clearly.

 

This is also something I need just to compare the MIDI box to itself.  I've equipped it with a mode button so that I can switch between two separate algorithms to see if some change---for example adding a saturation counter to the buttons---creates a detectable difference in response.  In addition, I've noticed that different instrument patches on the synthesizer have different attacks that can limit my speed of playing, and I'd like to test those as well.