No problem; building a VU meter is easy with these instructions from [Joe]. You’ll need either an LM3915 or LM3916 chip, a couple of bread boards, two audio jacks, ten LEDs, and a few other ...

The LED bar graph VU meters were invariably driven by the LM3915, a chip that contains a resistor ladder and a stack of comparators which can drive LEDs directly. [Juvar] has taken an LM3915 ...

The IN-28 VU-Meter comes with the LM3915 which has a logarithmic scale of 3 dB, starting from -27 dB to 0 dB in 3 dB steps. Also available is the LM3914 with a linear scale of 0.1 V steps from 0 ...