OK - 2 wishes for the eq's.. one of them is actually quite easy...

1) default eq settings... I think I still have 3 eq's that I've set, adn the rest of them are flatlined... if you defautled the eq's to something, then the lazy ones (i.e., people like me - ) could just fine-tune them from there...

2) ability to press a key to copy an eq setting to another; so that you can save changes w/o deleting the original.

Comments? for the first, the empeg software could see if an eq is flatlined, and setup presets if they are, keeping the first one flatlined, of course...

-mark


...proud to have one of the first Mark I units

The ability to copy one EQ preset to another would be very useful. One user-interface decision would have to be made, though: Do you copy both personalities (car/home) or just the currently active personality? I don't really know which one of those two behaviors I'd want.

As far as the filling-EQs-with-factory-presets thing goes, I dunno if that's such a good idea. It kind of smacks of that crap they're doing in consumer car audio gear these days, giving the user a choice of three preset EQ curves named "Jazz" or "Rock" or "Classical". What a bunch of malarkey.

I think that the EQs should all be flat from the factory. The whole point of an EQ is to fine-tune the unit's response to compensate for the quirks of your amps/speakers and your listening environment, and to correct for idiosyncracies in the source material. Any presets they supplied would be meaningless for each individual car installation since they're all different.

If the user doesn't know or care enough about the sound to carefully adjust his EQs himself, then he's got no business trying to change them at all. Presets won't help novices improve their sound, and they would just annoy experts who'd rather start with a flat curve and work from there.

But... having a plain-old bass and treble control, now that's something that would help novices without annoying the experts.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

This one is way out there, but how about having pre-coded presets by car type ? :-) So in emplode you can dial in your car, and it will modify all the eq settings to best fit the the stock situation for that particular make.

Ok. nah.

Calvin

You would need a preset for every combination of vehicle model, speakers, sub, amplifier and installation specifics (damping and so forth). That would involve us having to check out millions of possibibilities, but on the plus side we get to have a go in every type of car ever made.

Rob

If the user doesn't know or care enough about the sound to carefully adjust his EQs himself, then he's got no business trying to change them at all. Presets won't help novices improve their sound, and they would just annoy experts who'd rather start with a flat curve and work from there.

---

The problem is, you have people like me who don't have the musical skills to know where to start eq'ing.. I just know what sounds good, and what doesn't.. having presets would let me switch to a default, say "hey, this sounds better," and then fine-tune the eq.. They could always build a "reset" button on the eq which would flatline it..
-mark

...proud to have one of the first Mark I units

I understand what you're saying. But having factory presets wouldn't really help you improve your sound.

First of all, by definition, the presets would have to cover a wide range of possible car/amp/speaker combinations. Perhaps, out of all of those, none or maybe (if you're lucky) one of them might sound a little better than a flat EQ. All of the other presets would either sound worse, or, more likely, might induce strange artifacts that aren't immediately apparent to you but would be apparent to an audio expert.

For example, let's say you like bass (I mean, hey, who doesn't). You pick a preset that emphsizes the bass just right on your favorite album. But what you don't realize is that the same preset also has the 9359hz frequency boosted a bit, and it's causing distortion at about 9khz. You don't notice this distortion because you're really digging the bass and you're not listening closely to the high-end. (Also, high-frequency distortion is hard for some people to recognize even if they're listening for it.) You think you're all cool, but when you go to impress your audiophile friends, you embarass yourself because they all say "jeez, the high end sounds like crap".

See what I mean? And that's a rather tame example. At certain extremes, you could actually damage speakers or amps if you overboost frequencies that shouldn't be boosted.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

It was one of those late night musings. But then let's say in the off chance you were to attempt to provide this functionality, the right way to do it is to set up a web page that allows your customer base to submit EQ settings into a database. This database will correlate year, make, model, speaker type, amp type, all of that. Sort of like a CDDB for EQ settings. This can happen transparently, for example, the customer in a preferences screen dials in his car, speaker type, amps, all of that junk. And every time Emplode syncs up, it gathers the EQ data given a live internet connection, will ask the user for permission to publish the EQ settings to the DB.

Hmm... nah. ;)
Calvin