I would love to have one of these but their prices seem to have gone through the roof, I imagine due to the rarity of units like the Samson D1500 and the Alesis DEQ830. This means purchasing one is not likely as I don't want to fork out too much just to get a visual display.

Then, earlier today I was browsing eBay and came across this: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/111629832543

It's pretty cheap to buy, therefore leading me to the conclusion that it's probably cheap to make. I have a 1.5U ish space shelf at the top of my rack and am considering the feasibility of making something like this to fit that space. However, though I have soldered etc before, it's usually basic things and not 'proper' electronics. Would something like this be difficult to make?

I would ideally like to make a 32+ band version with 20Hz up to 20kHz displayed as a minimum. If possibly, I would also like to have blue LEDs and, if it it wouldn't be too difficult to implement, to have red peaks to the analysed, though not essential.

Anybody got any thoughts on how difficult and/or costly something like this would be to make?

 

In all of the track making tutorials, I have seen, the dear producer has used analyzers for dignifying his job but at the end, just your ears decide what sounds good or bad. If you're a collector, the situation differs.

 

Last edited by a moderator: May 11, 2016

Are sure you wanna build one yourself?
There are many ways to do it.
Analog: Build a bunch of band pass filters, LED drivers, an adjustable input stage.
Digital: Use a cheap embedded processor that is just capable enough to do an FFT of the digitized input signal, instead of the analog filters (that will save you lots of work)
There are nice LED matrix displays like e.g. the Adafruit Charlieplexed 9x16 blue LED matrix that will easily fit into 1 rack height unit.

If you're into making, go for it, and reserve enough time for building, but if not, then I highly recommend to either find a cheap/used one (DOD RTA, Samson D-1500 ...) or go with an alternative.

I personally wouldn't spend that much time for a device that won't help you make better music (except for the eye-candy maybe ;).
I'd rather find an old Android or iOS tablet and use one of the many audio analyzer/FFT apps, or use it as a remote display for your desktop. It offers much higher resolution too, and ususally has adjustable display decay time.
For today's price of a low-end tablet you won't be able to build a usable hardware analyzer yourself.

 

@fiction sounds like a good idea for the remote display.. any particular model of ipad that would work better for this?

I sound clueless coz I am,.. not an apple fan, but I might buy one for my imac someday for the purpose you mention..

and using an android tablet with a windows desktop? does that work natively? or you need middleware.. ?

 

better yet - try connect some old PC (2 cores recommended) to your network, run Flux's Pure Analyzer on it and you have a separate analysis station

 

An old iPad 1 works fast & well enough. I'm using it myself.
You can use one of the RDP client apps and remote-display your Windows desktop on the iPad, no problem.
An Android tablet would work just as well! Make sure it's not too small...