I doubt that I'll ever use a per-song EQ feature.. I know that I wouldn't spend the time setting the EQ for each one of the thousands of songs I have in my empeg.

Perhaps you're not understanding the point of such a feature. You wouldn't program a different EQ for each song. You would just choose which of the 16 presets comes up for each song. And most of the time, they would just use the default anyway. You'd only choose a preset for songs that needed it.

You see, I have many different styles of music on the Empeg, and each album is produced differently. Some are brighter than others, some have too much bass, some have not enough bass, some are too quiet, etc.

I would have one "generic" preset that was the default setting. That preset would cover most of my albums that sound OK.

For a few albums whose production is troublesome, I would choose a special preset for those songs. For example, I have an album by The Fixx which is a "remaster" job that was done poorly: They remastered "Shuttered Room" way too bright. So, one of my 16 presets would be called "Less Bright", and any time one of those songs came up, the Empeg would automatically switch to that numbered EQ preset.

Conversely, I have one Steve Morse album that's not bright enough (even when compared back-to-back with all his other albums). Without a per-song EQ feature, that album sounds muffled and gray when one of its tracks is played immediately after a normal track (even more so if it's played after one of those Fixx tracks).

These sorts of features aren't needed on consumer CD players because you're usually playing CDs in sequence. You don't notice the differences between albums because you get used to the sound of the album as you're listening to it, and all the songs are produced the same on that album. But on the Empeg, since one tends to use shuffle play, the production can change so radically from song to song that it becomes glaringly obvious.



-- Tony Fabris -- Empeg #144 --
Caution: Do not look into laser with remaining good eye.