Vintage and modern Vu-Meters, Oscilloscope, Spectrographs, etc.

[FrantzM]

HI

This was inspired by the SCH-REMOTE Digital VU/Spectrum Meter Review. I just ordered this SCH-REMOTE Digital VU/Spectrum Meter Review, a few minutes ago. Of course, it will serve absolutely no audio purpose. I hope it looks as cool doing nothing like those visualization componets of yesteryear.

I already know. it doesn't hold a candle to that :
.
I remember begging my father, back around 1975, to get one of these:

It did nothing, audio, but look incredible... displaying parts of your audio signal.
That was waaaay beyond pedestrian Vu-Meter. Dad decided that the sonics benefits were nil and wonfered about the purpose of this "oscilloscope", in an audio system. I lament this decision to this day ...

What else did strike your fancies, what are you using today?

Peace.

 

[Waxx]

I had once the luck to be able to play with one of these old beasts, and here the vu is great to see how much you limit.

 

[Waxx]

But to answer your question, i used this one in my youth, as part of a hifi system. That led frequency graph was fancy...

 

[sergeauckland]

My first Oscilloscope, the Cossor 1049.
100kHz bandwidth, but had a really useful feature not present in modern 'scopes, being a calibrated DC offset control that could remove and measure the DC on valve anode, and display the AC waveform.

Used it for years whilst at school. Pictures from the 'web. Mine looked exactly like the pic on the left.

 

[mhardy6647]

 

[fpitas]

You still use that. Don't you?

 

[FrantzM]

Hi

After reading my OP.. I went on eBay and looked for the Pioneer display... I found only one and the price is eye-watering... for something that does nothing but shows off a few graphs..
PIONEER SD-1100 Stereo Display Audio Scope VERY RARE Vintage 1972
$4950.oo yep, no typo

Peace.

 

[fpitas]

Hi

After reading my OP.. I went on eBay and looked for the Pioneer display... I found only one and the price is eye-watering... for something that does nothing but shows off a few graphs..
PIONEER SD-1100 Stereo Display Audio Scope VERY RARE Vintage 1972
$4950.oo yep, no typo

Peace.

I have to think you love it or hate it. That combined with the magic word, "vintage" drives the price up.

 

[jhenderson0107]

One of my favorite 'vintage' instruments - the HP 53310A modulation domain analyzer. It measures and displays amplitude vs frequency, rather than amplitude vs time like an oscilloscope. It's useful for jitter analysis, ISR latency, etc.

 

[Doodski]

Here is some of the highlights of gear that I owned for repair and calibration. I owned more gear than is shown here but can't find images of the stuff.
A vintage Tektronix Oscilloscope that worked perfectly and had been calibrated. It is an all tube scope. It attracted a lot of attention because it was in pristine condition and had a wonderful trace.

A Kenwood oscilloscope that prompted me to buy a Tektronix 7603 lab scope because the Kenwood trace looked horrible/blurry.

Fluke 8010A bench multimeter.

Tektronix 7603 Oscilloscope. With 250MHz vertical amps and a dual time base. A wonderful analogue oscilloscope.

I used this Kenwood multimeter for metering current when testing amps to predict thermal runaway. I also had a Beckman Industrial handheld multimeter that had a rare 20A DC range for current metering.

This is a Power Designs current tripping power supply.

A Hewlett Packard analogue storage oscilloscope with differential/balanced input. I owned two of this oscilloscope. I used it for metering when I was torture testing amps on loads and for aligning tape head azimuths with the analogue storage function engaged.

The CRT glows a green color when the analogue storage is engaged. It's really beautiful to operate this way.

A Hewlett Packard DC power supply with 30VDC and 50 Amps current limiting with the very rare 120VAC mains power option. The DC output is at the rear panel because it is high current output and banana jacks are not suitable/can't handle the 50A current for extended periods of time.

A Tektronix 465 Oscilloscope. A nice oscilloscope although it just doesn't have the accuracy in the trace as the Tektronix 7603 has.

 

[Lancruiser]

 

[GXAlan]

The McIntosh MI-3 and MI-4 are great classics.

 

[robwpdx]

Tektronix volunteers maintain a museum: https://vintagetek.org/. HP would probably have one.

I always liked the very large 3M 2 track machine meters. It was very satisfying to see meters on the console and all the tape machines moving.

 

[Anton S]

I still run my old Crown OC-150 speaker/amp switcher in my system to monitor output power. Since the K2 below it in the photo below is capable of 800 W/Chan into 4 ohms and 500 W/Chan into 8 ohms, which is more than enough power to melt the voice coils most speakers and I like my music fairly loud, I feel the need to keep an eye on just how much of that I'm sending out to my main L/R speakers.

The meters on the OC-150 can be switched between VU and peak hold with adjustable fallback.

I also have an old Kenwood KC-6060 in storage somewhere.

I had the audio scope in my rack for many years, but retired it after I picked up a Tektronix TDS2000 O-scope, which has more capabilities, a few years ago.

 

[Gruesome]

Other people here must have done this as well: as a kid, must have been in the early 70s, I inherited our first b&w TV, and converted it to display audio waveforms.
It could be used for signal tracing. Unfortunately, no pictures. I don't think I had a camera yet. (Plus, one wouldn't just take pictures willy-nilly back then.) If I remember correctly, you put the vertical coil feed on the horizontal coil, and the audio signal (the input and headphone amplifiers of a tape machine provide suitable amplification even for small signals) on the vertical coil. Don't kill the input amp! (I think using a 100k resistor as a probe helps to avoid the worst.) Also, don't kill yourself.

I also just received my Evor04-slim. What an amazing gizmo! (Never mind that there's probably an RPi 'hat' that does the same thing, with just a bit (yeah, right...) of programming on your end.) It's nice to see that there has been progress in audio since the 70s!

 

[robwpdx]

https://www.dorrough.com/products.html meters have been popular in the recording industry. They are not inexpensive. Now they are plugins to your digital audio workstation.

These comparator-based meters with light displays have no inherent mechanical inertia. So the time constants can be arbitrary in an analog integration network or in software. In the analog world, British meters used different time constants than the US. As discussed in the other threads, the intent was to manage overload distortion in analog gain stages and tape. With digital we are concerned about staying below the hard full scale limit of the analog to digital converter.

There are several interviews on the Audio Engineering Society YouTube page https://www.youtube.com/@AesOrgPage with Mr Dorrough.

The ASR community may be interested in this video on the history of VU meters. It was put together by Dorrough but never updated from Adobe Flash. So someone edited it down and reposted it.

From memory, Harrison recording consoles were an early implementation of linear VU meters on the bridge. Mr Harrison came from King Records. https://harrisonconsoles.com/histor...facturing,sound, and live sound reinforcement.

 

[Philbo King]

If you want a cool display & use a windows PC, install Winamp, and enable the Milkdrop visualizer plugin. There is also a Line In feature allowing you to feed in a (mono) signal to drive the display.

 

[dualazmak]

My DYI DIY 12-VU-Meter Array using IEC 60268-17 fully compatible large glass-face Nishizawa R-65 (W111 mm x H77 mm: glass-face W100 mm x H40 mm); ref. here on my project thread.

You would please find dancing videos of my IEC 60268-17 compatible large glass-face DIY 12-VU-Meter Array on my project thread;
_____Part-1: with "High Frequency Linearity Check Track" of Sony Super audio Check CD: #750
_____Part-2: with typical "Full Orchestra Music"-1: #751
_____Part-3: with typical "Full Orchestra Music"-2: #752
_____Part-4: with typical "Jazz Piano Trio Music": #753

 

[soundwave76]

This might interest the readers of this thread

Streacom Announces VU1 Dynamic Analogue Dials

The VU1 was inspired by a hobbyist project called CAPS which used analogue dials to show network, RAM, CPU and GPU activity. The dials were incorporated into a Streacom DB4 which is what caught our attention and led us to reach out to Saša Karanović who developed the firmware, hardware and...

www.techpowerup.com

 

[Jared2500]

Well the good news is that you can now live out your childhood dream, all for the cost of an untimely divorce.