I've brought this up before, but I think it deserves its own entry in the wish list.

One upon a time, the loudness control on a stereo was meant to be sensitive to volume. As you turned up the volume, the loudness decreased, and as you turned down the volume, the loudness increased. The whole idea was to keep the bass up above the car's noise floor even when you turned down the volume.

Not many stereo manufacturers implement it this way any more (in favor of a front-panel switch to activate and deactivate the loudness). But I'd love to see this old-school loudness implemented on the Empeg. One of my problems is that I can get the bass sounding great at either high volume or low volume, but never both. When I drive by myself in the car, I crank the volume, so the bass sounds great. But when I have passengers (*COUGH*wife*COUGH*) and I'm forced to reduce the volume, the bass is weak.

The user interface could still be the same, you'd still have the same loudness scale on the screen to adjust how much extra bass you want. But in actual under-the-hood implementation, this value would be the "maximum" amount of loudness, with increases in volume chipping away at the loudness value.

It would take a bit of experimentation to get the right curve and cutoff points. You'd probably want the maximum loudness to top out at a certain point on the volume scale such as -40db. Likewise, the minimum loudness should bottom out at some high value like -5db. And you'd need to decide whether it was a linear or a logarithmic taper, and you'd need to decide whether or not to completely remove the loudness at -5db or whether to leave a little bit in there still.

Finally, we'd need two different loudness personalities: One for home and one for car.

How about it, Hugo?

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Tony Fabris