One of the most common environment tests is the shock testing, widely used to test the mechanical integrity and to ensure the quality and reliability of products. During shock tests, data acquisition systems are normally required for measuring acceleration time histories and processing the shock response spectrum, or SRS. This paper presents a data acquisition and analysis system based on a computer sound card for measuring shock and characterizing the shock severity by its SRS. Since the tasks of shock data acquisition frequently require expensive hardware and software, this low cost system represents a very accurate and inexpensive solution for shock characterization.