Bodhi1
Super Member
I love the Nixie display on the Lampizator Horizon dac. My High End Audio Engineer is also currently prototyping a similar display for a custom amp he's building.
Looking for meters, visualizers, oscilloscopes, any "flashy" components
- Thread starter analogwisdom
- Start date
Lavane
Lunatic Member
Nixies are cool. I built a VU meter using an old componant timer for the chassis, and a couple bar graph nixie tubes.
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damacman
Resident Psycho
Hold on to your hats bitches ...
Bone Yard
Super Member
I love the lights, one of my little JDM Mini Stereos has something like 30+ LEDs on the front panel. My favorite EQ is a BSR-EQ3000, not for sonic shaping but for a light on every slider and a big LED display in the middle. I usually just hook it to output and don't really use it except for lights. Sansui put out the highly popular RA-500 Reverb Unit but it's kind of dated and they made it small so it looks goofy with any stacked stereo.
Technics has a unit called the "Space Dimension Controller," there's a slim model and the larger SH-8030 (and maybe more). The lights are changable and look like tiny neon bulbs, they are very bright. Although the display is small, the light show is very hypnotic. Kenwood has a similar unit and maybe the others but outside of Technics, they tend to be rare.
A couple years ago I saw an old 70's set of Soundesign Speakers with lights in the speakers. They were very entry-level design and went with a matching stereo. While cheap looking they were really cool and I could see using them just for the lights around a basement bar area. I think the boombox manufacturer Vela (Discolite) patented lights in speakers, one of the reasons we don't see them in more speaker applications.
Technics has a unit called the "Space Dimension Controller," there's a slim model and the larger SH-8030 (and maybe more). The lights are changable and look like tiny neon bulbs, they are very bright. Although the display is small, the light show is very hypnotic. Kenwood has a similar unit and maybe the others but outside of Technics, they tend to be rare.
A couple years ago I saw an old 70's set of Soundesign Speakers with lights in the speakers. They were very entry-level design and went with a matching stereo. While cheap looking they were really cool and I could see using them just for the lights around a basement bar area. I think the boombox manufacturer Vela (Discolite) patented lights in speakers, one of the reasons we don't see them in more speaker applications.
Ed240
Active Member
The SA-2001, from 1979, was 60 wpc RMS. The tuner was the TM-1001, and was decent because of the features you mention, like defeatable Auto-Magic, selectable bandwidths and multipath meter.
Lavane
Lunatic Member
The amp has turn over points for the tone controls and a tone defeat. The loudness circuit works great too. The added gain control under the volume control is nice too. I set it so at full volume it's just shy of distorting.
I only have 2 gripes really. One is I had to remove the faceplate, remove all the screws and nuts securing pots and switches so I could remove the front of the chassis just to get to the meter lamps. Even then, there were even more screws to remove from a cover and lamp board to get to the lamps. They used those rice kernel looking lamps that were soldered in.
I used LED fuse lamps and soldered them in.
It was a lot of work just to get to 2 bulbs.
The other gripe was thst they use 85° caps in the power supply. There is a dropping resistor and hot running voltage regulator with two caps right next to them. Both caps were on there way out. One was bulging, the other was actually burnt on the side. I bent the dropping resistor further away, put a heat sink on the regulator, and used 105° caps.
The amp is built like a tanks, but just as complicated.
Lavane
Lunatic Member
I don't see a problam with that. I used a Phase linear model.200 series 2 amp chassis I gutted to make a preamp out of. The amp let loose one day frying my speakers. The only time I ever saw smoke coming from speakers.
American DJ has a very nice rack mountable led peak meter for around $80 . Nice metal case looks great ! run it out of one of my tape outs to get the full effect !
I had forgotten I'd bought a laser light show unit a few years ago as it's mounted on the ceiling in one corner of the room. It has an endless display of room filling patterns with a microphone that can go to the beat of the music. Not recommended as it gets old quickly. The most fun I had with it was watching the cat get dazzled by it and chase a few dots around.