2024 Business Card Challenge: BAUDI/O For The Audio Hacker

[Simon B] enters our 2024 Business Card Challenge with BAUDI/O, a genuinely useful audio output device. The device is based around the PCM2706 DAC, which handles all the USB interfacing and audio s…

Build Yourself A Vacuum Tube VU Meter

Volume unit (VU) meters are cool — it’s an undeniable fact. For some reason, humans just dig lights that flash along with sounds. You can build a VU meter using LEDs, or bulbs if you&#8…

Salvaged Meter Movements Really Pop In This DIY VU Meter Bridge

If you’re going to build a nice VU meter bridge for the recording studio, the first thing you need is a nice pair of VU meters. But lest you think it’s as easy as putting some meters in…

Recreating The Quadrophonic Sound Of The 70s

For plenty of media center PCs, home theaters, and people with a simple TV and a decent audio system, the standard speaker setup now is 5.1 surround sound. Left and right speakers in the front and …

VU Meter Built With Neat Graphical VFD Display

VFD displays are beloved for their eerie glow that sits somewhere just off what you’d call blue. [mircemk] used one of these displays to create an old-school VU meter that looks straight out …

Build A Circuit Sculpture-Style VU Meter For Music

One of the coolest things any sound system can have is some kind of musical visualization. Thumping level meters that pump with the volume are a great example, and were particularly popular in the …

Teensy Spectrum Analyzer Has 170 Channels

While high-fidelity audio has come a long way in the past several decades, a lot of modern stereo equipment is still missing out on some of the old analog meters that were common on amplifiers and …

VFD Character Display Turned Into Audio VU Meter

Humans love visualising music, whether it’s in the form of an inscrutable equation drawing squiggles in Winamp, or a simple VU meter pulsing with the beat. This build from [mircemk] is of the…

Visualizing Audio With An LCD VU Meter

We all love seeing data represented in pretty ways — whether it’s necessary or not. Take VU meters for example. They’re a super useful tool for audio editors to balance signals, b…

Improving OLED VU Meters With A Little Physics

Last month we featured a project that aimed to recreate the iconic mechanical VU meter with an Arduino and a common OLED display. It was cheap and easy to implement, and promised to bring a little …

Analog Style VU Meter With Arduino And OLED Display

Looking for a digital recreation of the classic analog volume unit (VU) meter? If you’ve got an Arduino, a few passive components, and a SSD1306 OLED, then [mircemk] might have the answer for…