It's not stupid. Though I'm sure you see why digital VU like the one in the video fail - the displays used are simply inadequate. You need something with far higher refresh rates, and motion blur/ghosting mitigated.
EDIT: Btw any electrical people in the house want to explain to me, why the hell is it so hard to get VU meteres on products that don't cost an arm and a leg? Is it really that hard to do this?
I hate when I look back in the past, when manufacturing, and just life in general was far more laborious per ounce of energy expended, we were able to do all those things. But now in the present/future when the costs of things have fallen, and we can do more with less resources.. NOW for some DAMN reason no one can do anything that should be easy to do because it's relatively old and simple after all these advancements.
What is up with that?
ooh, no, I think you noticed something that my Nikon did with a slow 30FPS record. The LCD I used was IPS one with a fast response and parallel interface $2.5/pcs i.e. total BOM $3, so retail $5-7 is ok(1.2" square flat unit 2mm thickness, 3 wires: GND, 3.3V, Input). As I remember MCU also made >30FPS, maybe 50, a general cartoon idea was used: 3dmax makes 32 pictures of 0-100% animation, next Matlab packs that pics as index colored binary(need to fit all things into the $1/2 ARM MCU with 64k ROM), and C compiler in the end. So, pretty much an automated cartoon process.
Regarding the popularity of such LCD VU, take a look at this
In my opinion, it is absolutely ugly VU, however, seems my artistic taste isn't normal and the guy sold out 15000pcs for $77/pcs
