While high-fidelity audio has come a long way over the past several decades, a lot of modern stereo equipment is still missing some of the older analog meters that were common on amplifiers and receivers from the 60s to 80s. Things like VU meters are no longer common, but with the help of some microcontrollers it is possible to build them back into your sound system. [Mark] Shows us how to recapture some of the old school functionality This twin audio visualizer display,
Not only does this build include two displays, but the microcontroller to drive the displays maintains 170 channels in real-time. What's more impressive is that this is all being done on a Teensy 4.1. This board uses external RAM to help manage all the data and keep speed as fast as possible, and a second Teensy audio board is used to perform real-time FFT analysis. Most of the channels are sent to the display hosting the spectrum analyzer but two are reserved for the left and right stereo VU meters on the second display.
project from [Mark] basically based on this software from [DIYLAB] So everything is open source. While it was originally made for a specific piece of hardware, [Mark] Have it set up with a line in and line out plus a microphone input so that it can now be used for virtually any audio hardware. For Another Take on the Classic VU Meter, TTake a look at this design based on Arduino rather than.
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