Last month’s Ware was a peak programming meter driver board made by JC Broadcast, taken from an Audix broadcast console. Thanks again to Howie M for contributing the ware!
Howie hypothesized that the four mounting holes would be a dead give-away, in his words:
The meters, typical in the broadcast world, have two needles against a single scale; the 4 holes in this board are both mounting points and contacts for the two coils. The board takes a pair of balanced audio inputs, and drives the pair of needles with tightly controlled (and calibratable) ballistic profiles such that they indicate and hold audio peaks correctly, rather than giving the typical slower VU meter response. The board lets you switch the meters between showing the A and B input levels, or a Sum and Difference reading (which I’m guessing is the purpose of the two Meder relays).
However, it looks like nobody picked up on the mounting holes, and this was a stumper. Personally, I think the closest guess was “two-channel galvo driver” – the panel meters are basically galvanometers, so the physics of the guess was correct, which is good enough for me (and probably about what I would have guessed in the end — something audio-adjacent, obsessively concerned with precision calibrations and/or control loop tuning, but without enough heat sinks to push any significant mass). Congrats, Matt, email me for your prize!
PS: the DIP8’s on the hybrids have a Philips logo, but even with the best shot I have of them on file, I still can’t make out the part number.
Wow, I’d never expect such a meter to be this complex.