Electronic – LED- Resistor, does the position matter?

I do not believe you can reasonably run your display (or any multi-digit common anode display) using this chip. You may be able to finagle it to drive a single digit display through some creativity by hard-wiring the common anode to VCC and not connecting any of the DIG pins of the chip.

The way the chip works is that the SEG* pins "source current to the display" and the DIG* pins "sink current from the display common cathode". The way it's meant to be wired is that the common cathode of each digit on the 7SD is wired to a corresponding DIG pin and the SEG pins are wired to the corresponding anode segment pins of the 7SD. You serially load up "what should be displayed" into the memory of the chip and some configuration settings and it takes it from there.

The chip "scans" the 7-segment display for you and does this by, for each digit N:

• switching the DIG N pin to GND (and all other DIG pins to high-impedance).
• setting all the SEG pins to what is stored in its memory (optionally decoding the stored value as BCD first)
• then moving on to digit N+1 modulo the number of digits its scanning...

There's just no way you are going to be able to take advantage of the chip's multiplexing algorithm because it relies on the DIG pins driving the common cathode to GND to "enable" each digit in turn.

You could insert an inverting buffer between all the SEG and DIG pins of the chip and the display and then you would communicate with the chip and wire it up "normally" as though it was a common cathode display. Not worth it if you ask me...

The schematic is wrong. The LEDs should be the other way around. The TIP31 is a NPN transistor, so current flows into the collector and out the emitter. As Anindo pointed out, the battery is also drawn backwards. However, it is labeled as it should be installed.

This is a really crappy circuit. I would delete and forget about it as quickly as possible. Note that there is no current limiting into the base. The B-E junction will therefore clip the speaker signal to one diode drop in the positive direction. When the signal is loud enough to turn on the transistor, it will sound horrible.

Added:

There seems to be a lot of confusion about this circuit. This is certainly not helped by the "diagram" the OP provided instead of a well drawn schematic that makes the circuit immediately clear. Here is a properly drawn schematic of the original circuit:

From this it should be immediately obvious that the LEDs are backwards. The apparent intent is for the LEDs to light when the speaker is driven by some minimum sound level. Once the tops of the sound waveform exceed the B-E drop of the transistor, the transistor is turned on and presumably the LEDs are supposed to light. However, not in this circuit since the LEDs are oriented so as to block the current that would light them.

Here is a circuit that uses the same basic principle, but with the major flaws fixed:

The LEDs are now oriented the right way so that they will light when the transistor turns on.

R2 keeps the signal from being clipped to about 700 mV by the B-E junction of the transistor, or alternatively, keeps the transistor from getting blown out a large and powerful enough audio signal that refuses to get clipped. The 1 kΩ resistance of R2 is so much higher than the 8 Ω impedance of the speaker and probably even lower impedance of the audio source that it will not effect the signal. But, it is still low enough to allow enough base current to flow to allow the LEDs to light without requiring much more than the B-E drop level from the audio signal.

D4 clips the signal at the base of Q1 to a safe level during the negative part of the waveform. Q1 will be off anyway then, but the maximum reverse voltage level of the B-E junction of a transistor is usually not that high. With a sufficiently loud audio source, this could be exceeded, which would damage the transistor. D4 clips the negative peaks on the base of Q1 to one diode drop below ground, which is well within the reverse voltage capability of the B-E junction.