I would like to see graphical representation of the profile I am creating while tweeking the EQ presets. Of course, the ear is final judge, but visual feedback would be usefull for initial rough settings, especially for those of us without experience with parametric equelizers.

I've seen the kind of graphical response you're talking about on parametric EQs. The Logic Audio software I'm using has just such an interface. And it's incredibly amazing when you see it in action- you really can see just how the "Q" parameter affects the sound as you tweak it. It's very powerful.

There's a couple of things that'd make it hard for the Empeg guys to implement it well, though:

1) The limited number of pixels on the display. Although I think it could be overcome if, as you said, you could accept that you would only get a rough on-screen approximation.

2) The settings are just numbers they're feeding into the DSP. They don't really have any way of knowing for sure exactly how much the "Q" values are changing the EQ curve. They'd have to assume that a "Q" setting of x means the curve should be drawn here on the screen, but since it's not their code that's actually modifying the frequencies, it would (again) just be an approximation. This gets really tricky when you have multiple bands interacting with each other (where their Qs overlap, so to speak), because the Empeg guys would have no idea how to graph that. They'd have to reverse-engineer how the DSP handles it, then figure out a mathematical way to represent that graph on the screen.

On my Logic Audio software, they have advantages in both of those areas: A high-rez color screen in which to display the EQ curves, as well as the fact that their software is manipulating the bits directly, not feeding the values into a "black box" DSP. So their onscreen display can be accurate, even showing the exact final curve including the proper interactions between all the different bands.

In any case, implementing something like that would be far from a trivial task for the Empeg guys. Adding the Q and Freq to the equalizer was relatively simple: They just needed to work out the UI and storage issues- the DSP is really doing all the hard stuff. But graphically displaying the Q-modified curve is a whole different can of worms.

___________
Tony Fabris