Would something like this work as an all in one solution for a visual que as to which speaker is currently playing?

I would say Yes.
I can tell you from experience a 5mm super bright white LED is the most visible especially out in daylight.
Running one at 20 ma, outside on a sunny day was easily visible at 300 ft

 

I do feel like the steps listed above, while they may not take long to do for 1 speaker, will take a considerable amount of time to do for 64 speakers.

What is your budget for this project?
Can you assemble premade circuit boards with the components needed?
I would estimate the cost of each assembly minus the power source at less then $5.00.

 

What is your budget for this project?
Can you assemble premade circuit boards with the components needed?
I would estimate the cost of each assembly minus the power source at less then $5.00.

At less than $5.00/per speaker that will be withing the budget. I don't really have a budget, just a "need to keep it as cheap as possible". What type of power supply would be necessary? It would be great to have 1 power source, that would power all 64 of these units, if possible, to minimize the need for multiple outlets (or having to replace batteries).

This particular exercise, will not provide any ROI. The ROI would be seen in my dept getting product out and in a "finished" as it could be manner, thus lowering deployment time in the field.

I have the product that I mentioned above, being delivered tomorrow to test, and I can test this at home on up to 5 speakers, if you feel that would work.

 

You are certainly welcome to try that product.
A simple 5 volt USB charger rated 1 amp would be sufficient.
How many speakers would be on at the same time?

 

Would something like this work as an all in one solution

Those meters are rated at 30V maximum, but if the speaker voltage were greater than that (which it would be for signal peaks) they could be damaged. Perhaps look for some with a higher rated voltage?

 

You are certainly welcome to try that product.
A simple 5 volt USB charger rated 1 amp would be sufficient.
How many speakers would be on at the same time?

So the plan is for these speakers to be divided up into pairs, total 32 speakers, 16 possible stereo zones, but the could also be comprised of 5+ channel surround zones, and any combination of 1 "zone" up to all 16 zones could be used at any given time depending on the size of the system that were building. No more than 16 speakers (8 stereo zones) would be used with any one amp, as outmr largest single amplifier is only capable of 8 zones (16 speaker/channels). So in theory, if we maxed out stereo zones, we would have no more than 2 of the Audio Control D4600 amplifiers on at one time (I listed their specs earlier in the thread, but can attach again if that will help. But I would need it wired that if we are testing 1 stereo zone or all 16, only the speakers that are getting audio could potentially light up the LED/Display that is associated with it.

 

Just a nitpick, and not as a correction per se (and really, I should be able to resist saying this, but...)

The complete system involved in this application includes both the emitter (LED) and the sensor (human eye). When working out the efficiency of the system, both have to be taken into account.

As can see from the figure below visible light occupies a very small region in the electromagnetic spectrum with some interesting features. For example, notice how narrow the bands of cyan and blue, and on the other end, yellow and orange light appear, green seems pretty substantial, while the red looks far bigger than anything else.

But although this is an accurate accounting it doesn’t include a very important component—the varying sensitivity of the eye based on wavelength. Our eyes do not respond equally to all colors, some are “easier to see” than others. So, to determine the efficiency of an LED-to-eye signaling system both the cost (in power, and other things) and what each increment of cost is buying us in terms of efficacy must be combined.

View attachment 313817

the range of visible light
​

It turns out the human eye is substantially better at seeing green than other colors. In fact, around 565nm is the peak performance of the eye, a solidly green wavelength. In the plot below, if you draw a line at 80% pm the X axis, you can see it is mostly green, with a little yellow and orange—and no red or blue at all.

View attachment 313816
the spectral sensitivity of the human eye
​

We start to see the red at about 70%, but the blue is all the way down at 40% for a similar response. So, we see green, yellow. and orange well, red less so, and blue (and shorter) least of all. When it comes to LEDs, the high output InGaN blue LEDs are the king of output per watt. InGaN chemistry can be used to make UV, blue, or green emitters. The efficiency is inversely proportional to wavelength—so the very short wavelength (high frequency) UV types are most efficient, the blue less so, but the green dramatically less so.

Without further analysis, it would seem the blue LEDs would be the choice for maximum signaling bang for your power buck—but that leave out the other end of our system.

​

The figure below has the wavelength ranges of various colors. The typical high efficiency InGaN green LED has a peak wavelength of 535nm while the typical high output blue LED peaks at ~470nm. A Quick Look at the chart above will show that 525nm corresponds closely to peak color vision while 470nm os at about 20%.

View attachment 313819
Color vs. Wavelength
​

White LEDs... kind of don’t exist. What I mean is that a “white LED” is a blue LED covered in a phosphor that produces the white light we see. This its why early examples, and current garbage white LEDs have a very pronounced blue cast. The blue light is what is making the white light—and not for free.

The figure below shows the relative intensities of a white LED based on a Ce:YAG (Cerium doped Yttrium Aluminum Garnet) phosphor pumped by a blue InGaN LED. The first peak is the output of the blue LED, the second of the composite white one. Note the relative difference with the blue being much more intense. Of course, that power is used in generating the white light by fluorescence.

View attachment 313824
The relative outputs of the InGaN blue pump and the white Ce:YAG phosphor in a white LED
​

Notice that the white output has a nice peak about 550nm—solidly green. This is good for making the light useful to humans. You might have noticed that although old school high K (6000+) fluorescent tubes are very “bright”, the light just doesn’t seem as useful for seeing as something like an incandescent halogen bulb (~4000K). This is because that blue light doesn’t use the main sensitivity of your eye in the green as much as it stimulates the blue.

In any case, if we take the power we are putting into the blue LED and, instead, put it into a high efficiency green emitter, while the pure photons per watt favors the the blue LED, the usefulness of the output favors the green which means effective luminous flux per watt goes to the green.

All of this said, any modern, high brightness LED with a narrow angle reflector should serve. The narrow angle is very important because it will do more than anything to make the LED visible by concentrating the light in the direction of the viewer.

Sorry for my delayed response here. This is actually my first time ever posting to this type of forum and somehow I lost this in the overwhelming responses.

This is a great write up and as for the viewability, I think I have tried to take this into account (without having anywhere near this level of knowledge), really just blind luck ..haha.

I have chosen blue and green LED's. That we really the choose based on colors that align with our companies colors and would "look cool" in my mind ..lol.

The viewing distance would only be roughly 15' from about a 30 degree angle above the techs head and the line of sight would be directly straight on. Although the room is fairly large, the techs working on this would be right under and in front of the speaker array.

Hope this helps. I will also revisit this whole thread early tomorrow morning when I am on the train and don't have 3 kids running around crazy while I'm trying to comprehend something that I am very unfamiliar with.

 

Sorry for my delayed response here. This is actually my first time ever posting to this type of forum and somehow I lost this in the overwhelming responses.

This is a great write up and as for the viewability, I think I have tried to take this into account (without having anywhere near this level of knowledge), really just blind luck ..haha.

I have chosen blue and green LED's. That we really the choose based on colors that align with our companies colors and would "look cool" in my mind ..lol.

The viewing distance would only be roughly 15' from about a 30 degree angle above the techs head and the line of sight would be directly straight on. Although the room is fairly large, the techs working on this would be right under and in front of the speaker array.

Hope this helps. I will also revisit this whole thread early tomorrow morning when I am on the train and don't have 3 kids running around crazy while I'm trying to comprehend something that I am very unfamiliar with.

Don’t let it overwhelm you. If you don’t understand something you can do one of two things:

• If it is immediately important to your progress or fascinating enough you are driven to understand it, beat your head against it until it makes sense to you (and of course ask questions, here, the process). It can also help to read several different explanations.
  
  Not only can most things be explained in equally valid but different ways, even the pure math runs into edge cases meaning no one explanation can be called “the truth”—they are all points of view, and a lot of times someone’s valid way of thinking about it will somehow mesh with your thinking and BAM! you get it.
  
  
• If it is not coming to you and it’s neither of immediate importance or compelling, set it aside and come back to it. There are many things you won’t understand at first but then coming back to it with more knowledge about some other things it will be suddenly “easy” to understand. The truth is, we humans don’t really “learn“ new things so much as work out how they are like th things we already know.
  
  Aside from rote memorization, the real trick to understanding new things is to have something you dive into as deeply as you can, fully understanding it—until you grok it. Because the world is organized in a way that fundamental concepts are repeated everywhere, intimate knowledge of anything brings with it wisdom.
  
  Now some things are richer in content than others, and everything has its own special set of analogies offering different views of the rest of the world, but if you use your native interest in something, and pursue it in detail, and the aspects of it that offer the analogies which will assist you with other things things you‘d like to understand, you will find it powerful.
  
  You almost certainly already do this since you have been working professionally for a couple of decades+. It appears in those times when you say “ah, this is just like when…” and find yourself able to solve problems in this new domain you are working in by leaning on the “old knowledge”. Yes, we all learn by adding things to our analogy collection, and collect memes (in the original sense, from Dawkins) and later developed into Memetics à la Dennett and his ideas about tools for thinking.

In any case just take it slow, ask questions—no one will (here) judge you for that (and still be welcome here). Also, a very importantly, when you feel that something is over your head, simplify it at first. It will be “wrong” to the extent it is imprecise or incomplete in some way—but it will also be right if you understand the simplified version and don’t extend it past its usefulness. The dark secret is, even professional electrical engineers purposely ignore a lot of strange features of the forces, components, and circuits they work with—because they don’t matter!

That is, they don’t matter for the practical application at hand. They do matter when pushing boundaries, and that’s why research scientists and people working with things that are very big or small, very energetic or quiescent, anything that is on the boundaries of practical measure meant find they must attend to the subtle problems with the “practical” explanations.

I will leave you with one (I hope) cogent example. When you looked at @sghioto‘s schematic and became confused it was because of the two schematic symbols you’d not seen before: the optocoupler and the MOSFET. The truth is, while the symbol for the opto was actually pretty simple and probably wouldn‘t have been too confusing if you hadn’t been unsettled by it*, the MOSFET symbol is sort of like nutty hieroglyphics. The symbols for each type of MOSFET (N, P, Enhancement, and Depletion) are unique and it’s useful to know about them—but not for you at this time.

So, this is a trick—a memetic tool—you can keep on hand and use when you need it. The MOSFET has three connections: the Gate, Source, and Drain. The inside of the MOSFET isn’t important to knowing how to connect it in a circuit, or even to use it in a novel one (up to a point). You just need to know the MOSFET is like an electrically operated switch with the Source and Drain connected between the power and what is being powered, and the Gate being connected to the electrical signal that will turn it on—and off.

Now there are things you have to know to really use MOSFETs properly. But you don’t have to know them now while you are trying to learn. So you can simplify things yourself. Like many things, electronics—in the form of the components and circuits comprising it—are for the most part a set of simple things that, when put together, become a bigger more complicated thing. So, concentrate on the smaller, simpler things to gain an understanding. In most circuits** and applications the parts are very simple and you can figure things out by isolating them and attacking the problem as a set of simple things rather than a single hard one.

So, good luck—ask questions, be curious, do stuff you didn’t think you could do by learning a now way to think (or more properly increasing your skill as using the way you already do).

*I have found that people become overwhelmed and stop trying to figure things out when there is too much unfamiliar going on. So, put on the blinders and restrict your attention to familiarizing yourself with small, manageable pieces until you’ve built a more stable mental platform to do your thinking from.

**Except RF (Radio Frequency) circuits! While there are some RF circuits that are quite manageable in theory, in practice, when a circuit is surrounding by the real world, it gets very dicey. Particularly radiating circuits like antennas! But you can still learn th stuff, and you can actually still use this method—it‘s just actually hard to precisely calculate parameters and the like and people generally resort to lore and rules of thumb.