It would be good to upload and save (somewhere) the Equaliser settings for both Home and Away in the event that they are lost or edit unintentionally.

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

For what it's worth: Since the EQ's features got finalized several versions back, I haven't had even the slightest problem with losing the EQ settings. I've been through many many player upgrades, a disk drive addition, several occasions of the unit going into "power loss" mode (where it zeros the volume), etc., and at no time did I ever lose my EQ presets.

The only reason I could imagine we'd want offline storage of the presets would be if you wanted to transfer the settings from one Empeg to another, or if you were formatting the hard disk from scratch but you wanted to keep the EQs. If that's the case, perhaps it's just stored in a file somewhere and it's a simple case of the guys@empeg telling us which file it is?

Now, the ability to copy an EQ from one preset to another (copying preset number 2 to preset number 12, for example) is a whole different issue, and that's a feature I'd still like to see.

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Tony Fabris

I agree, I have been asking for this for ages. However, I still have the "Ooops" situation to deal with - it would be nice to be able to download a previously saved image of a particular preset to replace one I screwed up.

Ideally, if you could save all the individual presets as seperate files, then be able to choose which preset you would like to download them to, this would solve both the "copy" and the "oops" problems in one and make me doubly happy.

I am suprised you say you have nad no problems with presets; all the B12 releases seem to have had trouble (for me anyway) discerning the difference between Home and Away, with both preset sets having the same names - edit one in the car, the name changes in the home also. Edit the settings, though, and they remain seperated OK. This week under 12C Mk1 I have seen all my car presets appear at home when under AC power.

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

It would be good to (..) somewhere) the Equaliser settings for both Home and Away in the event that they are lost or edit unintentionally

Yep. Also, it would be very nice to protect a setting. I'd hate to loose the initial settings that the player comes with, especially when I've been (inadvertedly) saving changed frequency points and Q settings -- oops.

'Protect' and 'copy' between settings would be really nice to have in the player. A possibility for save/restore via emplode, heaven (note angel lay-out of Mk2 buttons ) sent

Henno
mk2 nr 6

all the B12 releases seem to have had trouble (for me anyway) discerning the difference between Home and Away

There was news of some of the releases getting confused about whether they were on AC or DC, but this has been fixed as I recall. And when it happened, this wasn't EQ-specific, it affected all the other home/car stuff like volume.

with both preset sets having the same names - edit one in the car, the name changes in the home also

That's by design. There are only 16 presets and only 16 names. Each one has two "personalities", home and car, but they share the same name. In other words, you shouldn't be naming your presets "home" and "car", you should be naming them "more bass" or "treble cut" or whatever.

This week under 12C Mk1 I have seen all my car presets appear at home when under AC power.

If you mean the names, then that's by design. If you mean the settings, then that should be reported as a bug (unless it's simply because you programmed the settings when there was still a bug with the home/car detection).

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Tony Fabris

That's by design. There are only 16 presets and only 16 names. Each one has two "personalities", home and car, but they share the same name.

Errr... then that's bad design, as far as I'm concerned. If I name a preset for the car, then if the preset set only exists under DC power in the car, it will not appear under AC at home. So why carry the name across? It's irrelevant. Poor design. Non-intuitive.

It is also not the way things were around B6, where the names were definitely seperated according to the set of presets and their operating environment (Home or Away).

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

Errr... then that's bad design, as far as I'm concerned. If I name a preset for the car, then if the preset set only exists under DC power in the car, it will not appear under AC at home.

Well, Rob, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one. But for the record, here's the reasoning behind having them the same:

Since the presets switch automatically between home and car, the idea is to have presets which do the same thing to the MUSIC whether you're in the home or the car, but which are tailored to the idosyncracies of the environment.

For example. Let's say I have an album that's mastered way too "bright", like my remaster of The Fixx's "Shuttered Room". They really butchered that one in the remaster. When I upgraded my cassette copy to CD, I tried to buy the original pressing rather than the remaster, but Amazon was out of stock on the original and I had no choice but to get the remaster at that point. Anyway...

To listen to that album and be able to enjoy it fully, I need to cut the treble quite a bit. So the idea is that I'd have a "normal" EQ as well as a "treble cut" EQ in my presets. When I want to listen to that album, I select the "treble cut" preset.

Now, the "treble cut" is the same EQ curve as the "normal" one, but with the high frequencies dropped several Db. But here's the key: Both the "normal" and "treble cut" EQ curves have a "home" and a "car" personality already, and those two personalities are different from each other to compensate for the differences in the ENVIRONMENT, not differences in the MATERIAL. So although the EQ curve between home/car within a given preset might be drastically different, they are the same in terms of when and why I'd be selecting the preset. I'd always select the "treble cut" preset when I listened to "Shuttered Room", whether I was at home or I was in the car. Yes, I had to program the two personalities independently (plug it into the car, copy "Normal" parameters to "Treble Cut", then cut the treble... plug it in at home, copy "Normal parameters to "Treble Cut, then cut the treble...), but that's the whole point of having two personalities in the first place.

In other words, there's no point to naming the home/car personalities different when the whole purpose of having the personalities is so that the only difference is whether you're listening to them in the home or the car. It'd just be a waste of characters- because you'd just name them "Normal Home", "Normal Car", "Treble Cut Home", and "Treble Cut Car". Why bother wasting the time/screenspace to add the words "Car" and "Home" to the preset names when it'll always be the "Home" one when it's on AC and the "Car" one when it's on DC?

The only reason you'd want to name each of the personalities differently is if somehow you needed 32 presets instead of 16 and wanted to manually cycle to all 32 presets. But that's not the way it works: You're not supposed to have access to 32 presets. You're supposed to have 16 presets that automatically switch personalities between home and car. Naming the two personalities differently would only cause more confusion.

Especially since we (hopefully) will one day get the ability to assign a preset to a given song or album. So that way, whenever a song from "Shuttered Room" comes on, it'll automatically select the "Treble Cut" preset for me. In that case especially, I WANT the home and car presets to be named the same and adopt the same behavior (with the home/car differences, of course).

If you don't agree with that assessment, do you at least see the reasoning behind it?

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Tony Fabris

I think Tony is right here, and the present logic is sound, except that it (and relatively large number of presets) really makes sense only when one is able to assign presets to individual songs (or lists, as timesaving feature when compensating for badly mastered album).

Let me also state my support for some other EQ-related wishes already expressed here:

- Due to large number of parameters it is time-consuming and error-prone to manually copy 'baseline' setting for a particuler environment into new EQ preset. Copying among presets would be very nice feature.

- Preset save/restore to a file (ideally from empeg itself, not PC software) would come nicely while experimenting.

- 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.

Cheers!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Queue #5196, waiting for shipping confirmation

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.

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Tony Fabris

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.

Hm, one (especially one without experience with DSPs :) would expect that algorithms implemented in the box are documented enough to reconstruct roughly their effect. That reminds me of job I once did, that of predicting, say, X-ray fluorescent spectra from known target composition, detector resolution and some previously measured cross-sections and shell energies. Boils down to superimposing a handfull of Gaussians. Is this what we are actually doing with parametric EQ, superimposing Gaussians with known amplitude, centroid frequency and width (or just amplitude with other parameters fixed in the case of non-parametric EQ), or is it more complicated?

Cheers!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Queue #5196, waiting for shipping confirmation

Yeah, Bonzi, it sounds like you've got a pretty good handle on what they'd be up against if they tried it.

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Tony Fabris

> would expect that algorithms implemented in the box are documented enough

You have no idea how much effort it was to get ANY documentation for the EQ. You're supposed to use Philip's Windows software to produce the data tables to program the EQ and then just generate some presets, like "Rock" or "Pop". We were frustrated with this because we knew the EQ was capable of fully parametric operation, and eventually we got some minimal documentation (after signing an NDA a mile thick) and worked the rest out ourselves (or rather, John did)!

I have to wonder whether any other car stereo manufacturer is using this chip for parametric EQ, or whether we're the only ones!

Rob

Yeah, Bonzi, it sounds like you've got a pretty good handle on what they'd be up against if they tried it.

Actually, I intended this as an illustration of a not too difficult problem (if you have all the data you need) . But, as Rob says in another post, the problem seems to be exactly in not having necessary data (e.g. published cross sections, fluorescence yields and shell energies, in my example). Hey, I am starting to exibit traces of nostalgia for my physicist days!?

Anyway, that graph looked like a nice idea....

(BTW, I see that Paul or wwwthreads authors have abandoned spelling checker's silly suggestions. Pitty, they were funny.)

Cheers!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Queue #5196, waiting for shipping confirmation

and eventually we got some minimal documentation (after signing an NDA a mile thick) and worked the rest out ourselves (or rather, John did)!

Are they crazy? It sounds as if manufacturer of a new computer language compiler would only let you know how to write 'Hello, world!' program and checkbook balancer, but refused to reveal the language's actual syntax!

BTW, what do we know about those parameters? Do we enter frequency in Hz (or octaves or something) and gain in dB, or are those units more or less arbitrary? What about Q - I suppose it should be related to sigma of the Gaussian. Are the curves Gaussians at all?

Cheers!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Queue #5196, waiting for shipping confirmation

- 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 agree too.
Why can't both settings be available in Emplode. I don't see it necessary to have the empeg be able to copy settings internally (would be a nightmare to keep track). some style of tabbed window, Home and Car, and the ability to copy presets appropriately. Then later we can worry about the graphic interface.
I used Cool Edit Pro to see what the curve waould be like, roughly, before plugging them into the Empeg.



Murray 06000047
____________________

Why can't both settings be available in Emplode. I don't see it necessary to have the empeg be able to copy settings internally (would be a nightmare to keep track). some style of tabbed window, Home and Car, and the ability to copy presets appropriately. Then later we can worry about the graphic interface.

I agree that copying (and save/restore) should have priority over graphical representation. Emplode idea is not bad, either. So, one first makes 'baseline' preset for both environments, fires up Emplode, copies it to all others, fiddles some more with, say, 'basic too bright', copies it to another two or three presets set to become 'too bright' variants... Workable.

I used Cool Edit Pro to see what the curve waould be like, roughly, before plugging them into the Empeg.

Well, that means that a) one shells out $400 for CEP (OK, it might be worth the money, but not just to see equlizer envelope :), and b) one knows how to translate empeg parametric EQ parameters to those in CEP

Cheers!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Queue #5196, waiting for shipping confirmation