Hi Folks,
Though I'm new to the board, I've heard about it for years from my friend Doug B. Repeatedly, actually.

Almost a year ago, we conceived this notion to replace the hundreds of feet of signal-carrying cable in his SHO Taurus with remotely controlled volume controls. The environment and the application dictate quite a few design criteria:
- power supply is single ended 12v
- ambient temperature varies from -40C to +40C
- his car stereo is amazing, so SNR should be at least 100dB
- devices should "remember" their last setting (so poor Doug doesn't have to reset all the controls every time he turns the system on)
- the signal incident to the power amps is about 14vp-p (hot!)
- a DIP package would be nice for breadboarding

A final criteria is sort of imposed by me. These chips that require a PIC or some other microcontroller intimidate me. So, since I'm the guy that's gonna build it, I'm looking for something that is also simple and adheres to KISS. Could be that I'm looking for the Holy Grail of circuits... Time will tell.

So -- both the Maxim and Dallas "digipots" are excellent suggestions from the analog voltage perspective. However, neither one stores the wiper position in memory and power up in the "wiper at low" state. Could it be that what we look for doesn't exist?

Perhaps a VCA would do the trick? Perhaps a speedometer cable routed from the armrest back to an actual potentiometer?

Anyway, I thought that I'd post my thoughts and see what happens.

Cool BBS!

Cheers,
Tom