scale of the meter object

Hello all,

I'm stuck on a problem that has been driving me crazy all afternoon. Hopefully someone will have come across this before, as it seems to be a rather simple issue, but I just can't figure it out!

Here is the thing: the response of the meter object doesn't align to a linear scale. That's hardly a surprise, because of the logarithmic conversion required by the dB scale. Problem is, I can't find a way to reproduce that same conversion anywhere else in Max. I want to be able to feed a slider with values in a way that corresponds to the display of the meter. Say the meter is right at the middle (6 LEDs out of 12). I want to know how to convert a linear scale (1-100 or whatever) into values that, fed into a slider exactly the same size of the meter, will drive it to exactly the same position.

That's probably a very complicated way to phrase something way simpler, but I couldn't come up with anything better. Hopefully the patcher attached will make it obvious enough!

What I've tried so far: atodb/dbtoa, scale using the 5th argument for exponential base, and more recently linedrive. This last one seemed very promising, but I couldn't find a 3rd argument value that corresponded to the way the meter behaves.

Any replies will be extremely welcome!

Best,
Felipe