Where's my pocket protector?!
So as I mentioned in passing a month ago (has it only been a month?) I got this blinkie-light thingie (a power/line level LED meter) for my stereo. For some reason this particular unit is rarer than proverbial hens' teeth (could be the age, or the limited production run, or both), so when it showed up on eBay I immediately snagged it.
I bought one new back in 1979 (minus the oak end panels) when it first came out, but after a decade or so of use I grew weary of it, and somehow it ended up in the trunk (or boot for those in the UK) of my then-boyfriend's car, thinking it would get dropped off at Goodwill at some point. Unfortunately, this was while I was living in SF and because parking on the street is the norm, when the inevitable car break-in happened, it was gone, along with whatever else happened to have been in there.
Anyway, after all these years I thought I knew everything it was capable of doing. What I didn't know—and just discovered today—was that it also had a peak-hold function that displays the highest signal level attained for a small period of time. I knew the silver button on the left side of the unit switched between line-level and RMS (power) display, but I started wondering why in addition to a switch it was also a potentiometer. So I turned it, and all of a sudden the peak levels were holding (the single LEDs that are separate from the main readout in the photo above), similar to how the meters work in my Technics amp. How long they remain on is dependent on how far you turn the knob. Who knew? There is no mention of this whatsoever in the admittedly-sparse instruction booklet—and frankly I think my original unit simply had a standard pushbutton, so it may explain why I missed this all these years. (This unit may be a later production run than what I had originally.) Sadly it only seems to work on the line-level inputs, not the power level side of things, but it's still pretty damn interesting that it can do this.
I'm such a nerd.