It's been bothering me for a while that there seemed to be some discrepancy in reports over the infamous "volume bug." When I first whined about it, I noted that the system became unresponsive to input and I had to physically remove the unit to restore sanity. Some of the posters looked askance at me (I know who you are; I can see you), and said that they didn't see that behavior. Rob made an off-the-cuff remark to the effect of "well, just turn down the volume" that floored me because it seemed so out of line with my perceptions.

I finally figured out where these discrepancies are coming from, and was able to verify by fiddling with the unit.

Whenever I need to adjust the volume while I am driving, my first preference is always to use the remote. Making a slight adjustment in volume can be an exercise in timing using the four-button layout. Hold the button too long, and it gets too loud; release the button too soon, and it skips to the next track and I lose my place in the song. The one function that I always use on the four-button panel is the top button, the pause button. It is elegant in its simplicity. If I am pulling into my neighborhood late at night with the top open, or if I need to concentrate more on the road for a minute, I just reach out and jab the top button.

Yesterday, I was driving around, didn't have my remote on me, and I gots to crank the Metallica. So I sucked it up and used the panel to increase the volume, and the volume bug kicked in. I instinctively did the same thing that I do if I accidentally hold the "increase volume" button too long, which is to start pressing the left button. The volume went down, and the problem was averted before I it really registered with me that I had encountered the volume bug. Like Rob said, not a serious problem.

Now let me recreate what happened the first time I encountered the volume bug.

I was driving, my wife was in the passenger seat, she had the remote, I was hitting next track on the console. One of us triggered the volume bug. This was before Empeg had programmed in the overdrive cap, so the unit when merrily on its way to +10.0db while we were heading 40mph down the street.

Each of us, obviously, began frantically messaging the unit to cut it out. My wife was repeatedly hitting the "down" button on the remote control, and I was mashing the PAUSE button on the console, because that is my instinctive reaction when I am trying to mute the box. When that didn't work, my next step was to start mashing on the down button in the hope that I could navigate the menus to "Power Off" (as I said, I am not a frequent user of the volume controls on the console, and it is hard to think very clearly when your skull is melting on a busy city street).

Here is the problem: when the volume display is up, the top and bottom buttons do not pause the track or bring up the menus -- they simply take you out of the volume display. Once you are out of the volume display, the top and bottom buttons should start workng as normal. But my wife and I were cancellng each other out. She would keep hitting a "down volume" button which would bring up the display, and then I would cut her off by hitting the top or bottom button before she could get any "momentum" on the down volume. But she would bring the volume display back up again before I could get the track to pause.

A freak situation? Maybe, but it was genuinely dangerous and I could see it happening to other users. It seems like much more serious lawsuit fodder than the silly infotext/visual business.

So my suggestion would be to allow the pause button to work even with the volume display up. Pause should bring down the volume display, but it should also pause the track without necessitating an additional button push. This should provide a good additional safety measure, since the "volume bug" seems particularly hard to ferret out and may never be entirely fixed on the Mark I units.

Thanks,
Corby
6-Gig Blue, SN#320