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?

___________
Tony Fabris