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METERS, METERS, METERS!!!

Mcintosh made a meter package for car stereo systems. It was calibrated for 4 ohms as I remember. Just connect to the speaker amp terminals and buy a modest 12 volt power supply and you are off and running. And remember these meters are specifically designed to have the same parameters as the meters on Macs fancy Power amps. Of course if I had the coin I would be using either a MA 6900, 7000, or 8000 in your case. I have been looking at my 207 and 2505 meters. New School and old School. Being an old school guy I prefer the Meters in my MC 2505.
 
dave1701 I don't know if something like this is your cup of tea but it might fit your budget for now; I just picked up this Pioneer QL-600A quadrophonic decoder amplifier for $100 yesterday off Kijiji Toronto and I confess I did it just for the meters!
It's only 10wpc and can run 2 or 4 channel. I'm going to wire it to my SX-1080 as a preamp for s&g. Four blackface meters on the 1080 and four on the 600A going and loving it. I'm sure there's better deals out there along this line but I had to have it. I think we pay more for vintage up here in Ontario but we don't let that slow us down. The guy I bought it from said he swapped out the original fuse lamps for LED so I think the color and V/mA may be off but I'm changing them back so they'll be bright again. Meter lovers unite!

PIONEER QL-600A (2).JPG

PIONEER QL-600A (3).JPG
 
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People who poo poo the meter idea, what else are you going to look at ?

I think as time goes by there will be enough big amps and receivers unrepairable that will make some spare meter movements available. No reason not to use these.

And they do not have to be calibrated to any specific amp, even the ones in amps simply measure the voltage, which you can measure anywhere. A true power meter would be quite expensive to incorporate. It would require measuring the voltage and using the current across the emitter resistors as a multiplier. Even Mac doesn't do that. Everybody just measures the voltage.

If you find these old amps all fried and unrepairable, you should probably use the meter driver board that comes with them. They all require different levels of compression to read right, if you want to read power, or an estimation of power anyway. If you want a true power meter you'll have to pay an engineer, and I mean a REAL engineer, thousands to design it.

It is a different story just to have a meter running on like the tape outputs to verify the signal level as compared to other signal levels. Even there, accuracy costs money. But that is a whole different thing than power meters.
 
Then death to justdave ! I am not giving up my meters. You'll get them when you pry my cold dead fingers from them.
 
Thanks for the replies, gentlemen! I'm carefully considering all of your posts. Right now I'm looking at amplifiers on Ebay that are broken/not working. I'm thinking if I found one on the cheap, I could hook it up to the tape output on my Denon and use the ebay one specifically for aesthetics. That, of course, requires that I actually find an amp that has big meters and is broken in a way so that the output doesn't work but the meters do. I'm not sure if I have a good chance of finding such a unit, but I'm entertaining myself looking around on ebay. I looked for kits on ebay to build meters myself, but there wasn't anything that looked close to what I was looking for. I do like putting together kits and stuff, but I am not good at creating aesthetically pleasing cases, so I'd prefer to buy something.
 
IMO, meters must be big enough to read and see reasonably clearly from at least 10 feet away. For typical analog needle meters, that means at least 2 inches tall and 3 inches wide.

Two of my favorites:
yamaha-p2200-217756.jpg


DSC00677.jpg

yamaha_pc2002m_power_amplifier.jpg
0606071.jpg
 
bryans12v said:
Save up for a decent Marantz 140!

Great sounding and looking power amp!
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The Marantz 140 requires tons of power to even get the meters to move. I have one. The Marantz 250 amplifier has switchable level controls so you can watch the meters at low power. If you are going to buy an amp with meters, make sure it has switchable scaling for the meters or you will be disappointed.

'ner
 
dave1701 said:
Thanks for the replies, gentlemen! I'm carefully considering all of your posts. Right now I'm looking at amplifiers on Ebay that are broken/not working. I'm thinking if I found one on the cheap, I could hook it up to the tape output on my Denon and use the ebay one specifically for aesthetics. That, of course, requires that I actually find an amp that has big meters and is broken in a way so that the output doesn't work but the meters do. I'm not sure if I have a good chance of finding such a unit, but I'm entertaining myself looking around on ebay. I looked for kits on ebay to build meters myself, but there wasn't anything that looked close to what I was looking for. I do like putting together kits and stuff, but I am not good at creating aesthetically pleasing cases, so I'd prefer to buy something.
Click to expand...
Don't get a broken amp, the one I posted works perfectly for $100.
 
That Technics meters only box, the SH-9020 is written up by KenRockwell and has the info on hifiengine. Seems to do stuff that the Crown OC-150 and OC-150a do, output control. Meters, peak, peak hold time adjustable and dB, amp switching for metering, speaker switch for amp 1, headphone switching for amp 2 and amp 3 and electrostatic speaker connections along with AC line voltage.
 
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