John Darko
Something to look at while listening to music? With vinyl records, the 12″ sleeve and a turntable’s rotating platter draw the eye; with cassettes, it’s a booklet and the tape band winding from one wheel to another; for CDs, a 5″-square booklet plus the advancing time code of the CD player’s front panel display.
What about streaming where the playback of digital files – from a NAS or the cloud – strips away physical packaging and cover art to set our eyeballs adrift?
One solution is a matchbox-sized (or larger) screen, mounted to the front panel of a streaming-capable hi-fi device, that shows a song’s cover art and metadata. Now we have a focal point once more; something to look at whilst listening!
Another form of visual stimulus is the VU meter.
The original analogue VU meter design – a mechanical needle fixed to a pivot point on a backlit display to show ‘Volume Units’ over a 300ms time window – was developed by NBC, CBS and Bell Labs in the early 1940s. One VU meter per channel gave us real-time analysis of a stereo signal for something that moves (approximately) in time with the music. Those paying close attention to the needle’s peaks and troughs could infer a recording’s dynamic range or set a tape dub’s recording level.
In the streaming audio age, VU meters can be virtual. Software coders add them to a streaming product’s operating system for digital front panel display where they are freed from the physical constraints of a pivoting needle to go large or small without performance penalty. A selection of alternative graphical overlays expands our virtual VU meter’s visual palette to suit mood or taste.
We’ve seen Luxman, Technics, Yamaha, Accuphase, TEAC, SPL, NAD and McIntosh continue with analogue VU meter designs in recent years but NAD, Eversolo, Audiolab and FiiO have loaded their streaming products with a virtual VU. They aren’t the first to do so. Logitech pulled similar stunts in the noughties with its Squeezebox and Transporter streaming models.
The latest to join our group of VU virtualisers is Cambridge Audio who earlier this month pushed out an over-the-air firmware update that added software-drawn VU meters to all EVO75, EVO150 (review here) and Evo 150 DeLorean Edition streaming amplifiers.
In an unexpected twist, a similar OTA firmware update is now going out to all CXN 100 owners. The CXN100 is a streaming DAC (review here) built around the EVO Series’ streaming platform.
Why the CXN100? According to Cambridge: popular demand.
And I can believe it.
Polling the Darko.Audio YouTube audience two months ago about its interest in VU meters returned the following results:
A whopping 11,000 people voted in the poll to tell us that 61% rate their enthusiasm for VU meters higher than the 19% who walk the ‘3 out of 5’ middle ground of indifference. Only 21% scored their enthusiasm below that midpoint. In other words, more people enjoy VU meters than do not.
The way I see it, Cambridge Audio’s virtual VU meter design lands at the mid-point between NAD’s futurist minimalism and Eversolo’s more visually basic designs that (for me) were a swing and a miss.
Further information: VU meters on Wikipedia
