It's been mentioned before, but I think I have something important to add to the discussion...

Having the ability to associate a specific EQ preset to a specific track (or group of tracks) would be very useful. For example, I have one album (a remaster of the Fixx's "Shuttered Room") that is excessively bright. It would be totally cool if I could associate a certain EQ setting with those tracks to crank down the high bands a bit. Another use would be to EQ older albums differently from newer albums- older ones (albums made in the heyday of vinyl) are quieter with less bass and less dynamic range. Newer albums push the bass and the dynamic range to the digital limits. Having associated EQs would allow me to compensate for this, and would in fact eliminate the need for auto-normalization of the volume on playback.

This wouldn't require that much storage- only an additional four bits per database entry. Since the entry would only point to one of the numbered presets, rather than storing the entire EQ with each song.

The more I use the Empeg, the more I realize that such a feature is almost a necessity. Never before have I been able to play so many different kinds of music in the same place at the same time. It's startling to hear how radically different the production is on the various albums I own. I never noticed it before because I hand-tweaked the bass and treble every time I changed CDs in my car. Now that "change" is happening on a per-song basis. I could spend an hour getting the EQ set just right for "Ray of Light", only to discover that "Permanent Waves" sounds like crap with those settings. So this is definitely something worth some serious consideration.

Of course, the above has already been suggested. Here comes the important thing that I wanted to add.

The Empeg already knows the difference between whether it's plugged in at home or plugged in the car. This is evidenced by the fact that it has different volume settings between home and car. Well, I need radically different EQ settings for home and car, too. It would be nice if the Empeg could change its EQ automatically-- as it is, I manually swap the EQ presets when I move it from place to place. If the Empeg could change the EQ's as easily as it could change the volume settings, it would make me very happy.

Now here's the critical part: If you add the ability to associate EQs with tracks, you would then need to make TWO associations for each database entry, not just one. That way, you can have two different groups of EQ presets, for both home and car, and each track would know the difference. This would mean an additional eight bits of storage per song instead of just four- still very much in the "inexpensive" range as far as storage is concerned.

If implemented properly, it would be so perfect: You could adjust all of your music preferences to automatically compensate for the unit's environment as well as for the quirks of the individual tracks. Swapping the unit between home and car would be totally transparent. Going from an song recorded in 1980 to a song recorded in 1999 would also be totally transparent. (Provided you took the time to choose a proper pair of EQ presets when you uploaded the songs.)

Now, the average user might get a little confused by all of this, so you would make sure that they aren't forced to set up a per-song EQ. By default, the EQ would not get changed on a per-song basis. There could be a default EQ setting for home and car that would be used. But if a given track had the EQ parameter applied to it, then it could choose that EQ preset based on its current environment.

One more thing... if doing this, you should probably give the capability to group-implement an EQ change over a range of selected tracks. That way, someone with an established set of a thousand songs wouldn't have to open each one individually-- they could group-select them by album in Emplode.

So... Comments? Whaddya think?