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Instrument families

OpenSXRaw's corpus covers two SCIEX instrument families that both use the legacy .wiff/.wiff.scan container:

TripleTOF

Quadrupole time-of-flight instruments (TripleTOF 5600/6600 confirmed in the validation corpus). TripleTOF acquisitions run high-resolution DDA (data-dependent acquisition) or DIA/SWATH workflows, and make heavy use of TOF-specific calibration telemetry (TOFCalibrationData, TDCStatistics) and ExperimentTOF method blocks - see Format specification.

QTRAP

Triple-quadrupole linear ion trap instruments (QTRAP 5500/6500 confirmed in the validation corpus) typically running scheduled MRM/SRM targeted acquisitions (sMRM/sMRMEX method blocks). QTRAP is nominal-mass, not true time-of-flight, unlike TripleTOF.

How the reader tells them apart

It currently doesn't. Reader reads scan data identically for both families via the shared Idx/.wiff.scan mechanism, and reports every spectrum with the same Analyzer::TOFMS / profile-mode metadata regardless of source instrument - see Reader: what the reader does not yet do. If you need to distinguish TripleTOF from QTRAP output today, check the method-subtree contents yourself (ExperimentTOF vs sMRM/sMRMEX) - a proper instrument-family detector is not yet built into the reader API.