The PCBs came in on Friday, June 28th and they looks pretty good. Below is a picture that includes almost completed boards and some boards still on the panel.

The matte black soldermask was a good choice. I made a mistake that wasn't caught until assembly and I opted for the manufacturer to send the parts with the PCBs and I would finish the assembly. The USB C part, in the BoM, had the THT tangs for the shield and the footprint used was for an all SMD part. This is easily fixed by bending the tangs out.

Now the part that you've all been waiting for. Does it work? No. After doing some preliminary testing. I have a few ideas where the flaws in the design lay.

The video below shows a bit of testing. Had to bypass the USB C connector to supply power to the board. I also used a Analog Discovery 2 as a waveform generator to inject a triangle wave to see if the LEDs would sweep across the VU meter ark.

1. In testing, the +/-2.5 volt regulators were working as designed. This was confirmed with testing the voltage rails of each op-amp. Now the problem with the +/-2.5V rail design was that it was flying too close to the Vf of some of the LEDs. The next revision will use +/-5V regulators to widen the power rails.

2. The mids filter did not work at all. Troubleshooting signals was difficult due to the size of the components used in the filters. To rectify this, the new design will use larger components and incorporate some test points to make probing signals easier.

It is disappointing that the design did not work with the first go. But let this serve as an example that a design might not work on the first go and that a few revisions may be needed to realize the idea behind the project.