Here's what I've learned trying to calibrate the LED meter for gain reduction.
If you set R55 as in the calibration notes, the full scale meter voltage goes from 0 to about 200 mv, shown in the orange curve below (which is the measured meter voltage for an increasing sweep of compression, like I posted yesterday). The LEDs don't light except for really high levels of compression, if at all (this was my experience anyway). This range however is appx. as expected to go to a 200 uA meter as used in the original 525 (generally these meters have a 1kohm resistance, yes?).
The LM3916 circuit, however, is set to work with a full scale range of 0v-1.2v, shown by the brown line (this is from the comparator resitances in the datasheet). The markers show when the LEDs turn on.
The blue line is what I got for the meter voltage for the same sweep of compression with R55 cranked up. This gets all the LEDs working (again, in my experience). The horizontal dashed lines show when each LED turns on as the gain reduction and meter voltage increase. The first five LEDs turn on before reaching 2 dB of compression, then the next five roughly indicate 3,4,6,8,~12 dB of compression.
For future designs using this chip, I'd suggest adding a few more components to set the voltage range for the chip (R2 in the datasheet for setting the high voltage reference, pin6, and a voltage divider to set the low voltage reference, pin 4, instead of tied to ground).
This would allow the meter LEDs to be more effective in showing gain reduction. The way I have it now, the first 5 LEDS all go on together. But with the extra resistors, you could calbrate the 1st LED to turn on at low GR and the 10th LED to turn on at high GR, and be more spaced out in-between. The slope and offset of the brown curve could be shifted to align better with the blue line. Ideally, you would want a comparator chip that matches the curve of the blue line but I don't think any of the LM391x chips would do this perfectly (or better than the lm3916).