My DIY Audio Scope so far (will update)

[doity]

I had the idea one night last week and by the next day I had scrounged the parts around the house and had ordered the LED meters off of eBay. The only thing I bought besides the lights were some black film for the front.

I am planning to use 4 six inch green LED meters with phono inputs so the display should fill up the whole ‘screen’. It is not actually a screen but a lid from a 1980’s cheap stereo with linear tracking turntable. The back of the enclosure is the lid from a Sony front loading cassette deck....the two just happened to fit perfectly.

I got the Panasonic badge off of a old boombox to make it look legit . The hardest part is going to be when I mount the lights because it is actually a PCB about 2 1/2 inches deep. I have been wracking my brain thinking how to do this. I could use brackets on the back but that would leave me no room to route the wiring. Will probably just find some kind of plastic hardware that the boards can slide into from the side and make sure that they are secure because they will be free standing.

I will update in a few weeks when it is finished and I will either be joyous or very LOL! The light that is in there now is something that I had laying around and is just for testing to how it look when finished.

 

[Jim the Oldbie]

Noice! DIY FTW!

 

[Mark Anderson]

Looks cool. Will be nice to see it finished. The front face looks similar to this unit

http://www.surrounddiscography.com/quaddisc/Technics 4 Channel AFD Color Scope 2019.mp4

 

[J. PUPSTER]

Looks cool. Will be nice to it finished. The front face looks similar to this unit

http://www.surrounddiscography.com/quaddisc/Technics 4 Channel AFD Color Scope 2019.mp4

Trick video Mark - the tape he has in is Steve Miller the music is that "Little Ol' Band From Texas"

 

[doity]

Wow Mark, that is quite the cool scope. Is that a homemade job or was it a real vintage piece? And I thought mine was big (the scope that is). I was going more for what the Pioneer models had with the fake scopes. I had no idea of what I was doing or how it might turn out but so far so good.

I think I found something to use to secure the meters to the glass (acrylic). It is this stuff called Sugru and it is basically a putty type compound that can be shaped and will hold well when dry. I bought a whole bunch of the stuff and hopefully that should do it. If not it is back to square one. Good thing is that the materials I am working with are pretty forgiving so there is room for error.

 

[Sonik Wiz]

I had the idea one night last week and by the next day I had scrounged the parts around the house and had ordered the LED meters off of eBay. The only thing I bought besides the lights were some black film for the front.

I am planning to use 4 six inch green LED meters with phono inputs so the display should fill up the whole ‘screen’. It is not actually a screen but a lid from a 1980’s cheap stereo with linear tracking turntable. The back of the enclosure is the lid from a Sony front loading cassette deck....the two just happened to fit perfectly.

I got the Panasonic badge off of a old boombox to make it look legit . The hardest part is going to be when I mount the lights because it is actually a PCB about 2 1/2 inches deep. I have been wracking my brain thinking how to do this. I could use brackets on the back but that would leave me no room to route the wiring. Will probably just find some kind of plastic hardware that the boards can slide into from the side and make sure that they are secure because they will be free standing.

I will update in a few weeks when it is finished and I will either be joyous or very LOL! The light that is in there now is something that I had laying around and is just for testing to how it look when finished.

Looks like the start of something cool & fun. Interestingly I was looking at (again) the LED VU indicators on Ebay for the same purpose! I was planning on using green/yellow/red with green at the inside or center and red at the outside. I have a perfectly functioning Panasonic Q scope so I have no urgent need to do this. But I thought I could make an input/output level monitor control center as companion to my SMv2. Then that would have enough functionality that I could switch it out with the Panny.

Isn't it fun cannibalizing & repurposeing old stuff? I'd like to see pics of the two enclosures you are referring to. As for mounting the LED indicators why not get right sized perf board or similar & use double stick foam tape on the back of the indicators? Then apply to the perf board in correct position & place behind your display window?

DIY much? Any other goodie projects to share?

 

[Mark Anderson]

Is that a homemade job or was it a real vintage piece?

It was made by Technics and used as a demo but not for sale. More on the unit can be found here
https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/forums/threads/technics-4-channel-afd-17-color-scope.22735/
Good luck on yours, folks get mesmerized looking at it when listening to music in surround. I often have to snap my fingers to wake them out of a trance

 

[kap'n krunch]

Wouldn't a software "visualization" in Quad/5.1 be cool?

 

[Sonik Wiz]

Wouldn't a software "visualization" in Quad/5.1 be cool?

Actually buried somewhere in the forums within, oh, the couple of years was a project that did that. It was technically successful but aesthetically mediocre. The difference being that a CRT phosphor has a measurable decay time; the time it takes for a spot to fade out after the spot has moved elsewhere. That makes the CRT version much smoother & easier to interpret the display. Discussion was made on how to add artificial decay time to the software project & it fizzled out at that point.


Now if you want something that is 2 ch but is so powerful it has been known to cause Royal Houses of Europe to crumble. The Atari MusicVision:



Yes I have one. I've never hooked it up to my 8' screen for fear of causing cerebral hemorrhage.

 

[ProgRules]

Now if you want something that is 2 ch but is so powerful it has been known to cause Royal Houses of Europe to crumble. The Atari MusicVision:

Yes I have one. I've never hooked it up to my 8' screen for fear of causing cerebral hemorrhage.

So cool! I checked them out and the 2 they have on ebay are from $400-450. Too pricey for me but a cool toy.

 

[doity]

Isn't it fun cannibalizing & repurposeing old stuff? I'd like to see pics of the two enclosures you are referring to. As for mounting the LED indicators why not get right sized perf board or similar & use double stick foam tape on the back of the indicators? Then apply to the perf board in correct position & place behind your display window?

DIY much? Any other goodie projects to share?

Here are pictures of the two halves. Not too pretty from behind. I even used wet/dry sandpaper taped to the back to darken the innards. I thought of using something like perf board to mount but the problem is I would need something with a angle to it to mount to the plexiglass.

 

[bigbillquad]

Hi. All

There must be something out there that one of you wiz bang scientist can come up with a design..
BBQ...

( New 32 LED Level Indicator VU Meter Music Sound Audio Display Analyzer | eBay )

( EVOR04: Color LCD touchscreen audio spectrum analyzer, VU meter, Oscilloscope | eBay )

( https://www.edn.com/simple-circuits-enable-oscilloscope-art/ )

( Clear Acrylic Case Shell Housing For DSO138 2.4" TFT Digital Oscilloscope Kit/A5 | eBay )

( DIY Oscilloscopes )

( MEMS Microphone Hookup Guide - learn.sparkfun.com )

 

[Sonik Wiz]

So cool! I checked them out and the 2 they have on ebay are from $400-450. Too pricey for me but a cool toy.

Whaaa! Mine cost like $129. I think. Haha must have ch 3..

 

[doity]

Hi. All

There must be something out there that one of you wiz bang scientist can come up with a design..
BBQ...

( New 32 LED Level Indicator VU Meter Music Sound Audio Display Analyzer | eBay )

( EVOR04: Color LCD touchscreen audio spectrum analyzer, VU meter, Oscilloscope | eBay )

( https://www.edn.com/simple-circuits-enable-oscilloscope-art/ )

( Clear Acrylic Case Shell Housing For DSO138 2.4" TFT Digital Oscilloscope Kit/A5 | eBay )

( DIY Oscilloscopes )

( MEMS Microphone Hookup Guide - learn.sparkfun.com )

Yeah you would think with the obvious marketplace for people wanting to “see” their audio that someone didn’t market something for people into multi-channel audio. If you see some of the cool displays that upper end ham and shortwave radios have it obviously can be done. I am not a electronics wiz but you would think that it would be easy to build a box like a A/D converter to convert audio signals to digital signals that would then plug into a small touch display that people could customize the look of with embedded software.

You would think that people like the people at Involve Audio would work in conjunction with a hobbyist to come up with something like this. Or some other person or startup could do it quite easily you would think?.

 

[sjcorne]

You would think that people like the people at Involve Audio would work in conjunction with a hobbyist to come up with something like this.

Not sure if it's still in development, but a few years ago they mentioned working on an elaborate multichannel pre-amp with numerous features including visualizations (VU Meters, Oscilloscope, etc).
https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/fo...super-surround-preamp-preliminary-info.25537/

 

[doity]

I have the VU boards partially secured and will install the power supplies hopefully tomorrow. I won’t get the AC cords for a couple more days so I hope the meters work after installing everything.

So far this experience has been a real exercise in frustration. Don’t try this at home kids

 

[doity]

I put the power supplies in tonight and will have to wait for the glue to dry and also secure all cables before I can turn it upright. Does it all work? Who knows

I know one thing I didn’t count on is that the screen is not square but more rectangular, so I wasn’t able to put the meters in like I imagined going in. I had to eyeball the positioning and thus will need to either ‘make’ the screen square using more tape and lose some of the segments or tear off some of the existing tape to fit most of the lights in.


Luke P.

 

[doity]

First Picture!! I still have some work to do on the front panel because as I mentioned earlier that when I did the initial measurements I did not take into account the shape of the screen. Therefore I couldn’t line up the lights as I envisioned and there is not enough viewable space as needed.

I will eventually post a new picture and maybe a video when all is said and done. At least I proved that it could be done....whether it was worth the headache or not who knows?

Let me know what everyone thinks. Would love the feedback.


Luke

 

[doity]

Short video without audio.

 

[bevergerner]

Hi,
a fine project and I´m very interested in the video - but "it is private".
So I can´t see something

Thanks for another try to public the video

Stay healthy
Jörg