  Many stars exhibit stellar pulsations, favoring them for asteroseismic
analyses. Interpreting the oscillations requires some knowledge of the
oscillation mode geometry (spherical degree, radial and azimuthal orders). The
delta Scuti stars (1.5 - 2.5 M_sol) often show just one or few pulsation
frequencies. Although this may promise a successful seismological analysis, we
may not know enough about either the mode or the star to use the oscillation
frequency to improve the determination of the stellar model, or probe the
star's structure. For the observed frequencies to be used successfully as
seismic probes of these objects, we need to concentrate on stars for which we
can reduce the number of free parameters in the problem, such as binary systems
or open clusters. We investigate how much our understanding of a delta Scuti
star is improved when it is in a detached eclipsing binary system instead of
being a single field star. We use singular value decomposition to explore the
precision we expect in stellar parameters (mass, age and chemical composition)
for both cases. We examine how the parameter uncertainties propagate to the
luminosity - effective temperature diagram and determine when the effort of
obtaining a new measurement is justified. We show that for the single star, a
correct identification of the oscillation mode is necessary to produce strong
constraints on the stellar model properties, while for the binary system the
observations without the pulsation mode provide the same or better constraints
on the stellar parameters. In the latter case, ...
