Hey all... I have a small home studio setup for doing voiceovers and sound work, mainly for video/PC games. Nothing especially demanding of "audiophile" quality but at least decent. For a long time, I used an ancient mono Gates Studioette 80 console, but I finally needed to upgrade to something stereo with little to no money to work with, thus a new console was simply out of the question. So, before you flame me for the following hack job, this was the best I could do with what I had at the time!!
I really needed to have both AUD & PGM output busses in stereo, so I gutted the Gates completely and mounted two identical Radio Shaft stereo mixers inside the Studioette chassis. Sorry, but I'm "old Skool" and find the rotary pots much easier to work with, blame that on my radio experience back in the 70's... Considering the hack job that it is, it does the job quite well, except for ONE little bug...
The RS mixers originally had a pair of those typical "cassette deck" style VU meter movements in it that I'd guess were about 50uA FSD. I found a pair of Modutek 4" meters, complete with mounting bezels, so I used them to replace the large Weston movement in the Gates. However, it seems to take a *lot* more to drive these to full-scale, and they're reading at least 10dB below "actual" levels.
Anyways, I've maxed out the meter trimmers on the mixer and it's still pinning the VU meters on the compressor following it when the Modutek's are indicating only +1dB, and there is great distortion anywhere beyond that. The metering circuit inside the RS mixer rectifies the signal to DC via a half-wave bridge. The Modutek meters are also DC movements (nio internal rectifiers) and I have even tried disconnecting one side of the internal 600 ohm shunt, with no effect.
The console does has an unused 1-amp variable PS as well as an extra stereo headphone amp in it, with volume and tone controls.
-IDEA # 1... run the existing metering signal into the headphone amp and using the output to run to the meters, but I'm not sure if it would work very well with the pulsating DC as an input.
-IDEA # 2... I remove the meter lines from the mixer circuitry altogether, run them to the actual audio outputs coupled through a series
150uF electolytic. I can run that into the headphone amp, it's output feeding to a full-wave bridge across the meters. Calibrate with volume/tone controls accordingly to match the input level shown on the compressor's VU meters.I'm toying with idea #2... sounds easiest to me and probably more accurate in the long run. I don't really need it to be 100% accurate, but I do want it to be at least within a dB or so of "actual" rather than the convoluted mess which I have now.
Ideas? Comments? Free stereo console you're sick of tripping over?? :-)
Thanks