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