Personal web pages of

Tim Stinchcombe

Stereo LED VU Meter

When I first got my synth, I was using it through my old trusty 'hi-fi' amplifier (a venerable 8+8W solid state (!) Teleton SAQ-206B [old schematic link now also on the new page], to those of you who might know what one of those was - cost me the princely sum of £24 back in 1974!), and I was very wary that the synth was lobbing signals of the order of ±5V and more around, and I really didn't want to stuff the amp by feeding it those kinds of voltages. I use an A-134 Panning Module as the output of the synth, to attenuate the output signal, but thought it would be nice to have some sort of visual indication of what was going into the amp too. The Velleman 2 x 10 LED Stereo VU Meter, kit K4305, seemed to be just the job. It is based around the LM3916 bargraph chip, is quite cheap, and (with some fiddling) mountable on an blank 8hp panel:

The plastic overlay could be easily cut to a suitable size, and conveniently not only masked the rather unruly slot filed in the plate for the LEDs, but also covered a couple of mounting screws too.

[Page last updated: 30 Jan 2011]