In the past I have rebuilt the XXL VU meter from Elektor, of course on an original printed circuit board, it still works as required. Now I have a home cinema with many outputs and I am busy rebuilding this VU meter. I have rebuilt four of them with the original printed circuit boards from Elektor which were ordered from a reputable company. But what turns out, all four of them do not work! The first LED bar lights up fully and the whole thing gets quite hot and uses 240 MA, after many hours of searching and trying I made a LM 3915 tester and what turns out that all 24 of them are no good! These ICs came from Amazon and I complained, I got them refunded and ordered new ones elsewhere so now just have to wait. The tester of the LM3915 was of course also tested first with a known-to-be-working IC and worked fine.Now I'm looking for a reliable source that still has these ICs, but unfortunately I can't find one. I ordered 30 from another source, but they didn't work either. Why do the old ICs from 2014 work then? I swapped them out and used them in the new projects, and that works! So the problem is really with the ICs. I'm buying the LM3915N-1, as the old one only has LM3915 on it.