car stereo (and, apparently, synthesizer) ergonomics

The BBQ Pit
1

I have owned several car stereos over the years (courtesy of my neighborhood grabby footpads, who steal them from me at a rate of about one a year). Never have I found one that is ergonomically satisfying. They all seem to require wading through menus, fumbling around for buttons designed to blend in with the faceplate, and taking valuable face time away from the road in order to see the ultra hi-tech display.

Now, a slight digression. I play keyboards for a living. Preferably real piano, organ, Rhodes, etc, but realistically I spend most of my time on synths.

Back in the 70s, when synthesizers first became mass available, they were festooned with knobs and sliders, one for each synthesis parameter. Altering your sound in real time was simply a matter of grabbing the right knob.

But in the 80s, synth manufacturers realized that, with the advent of digital technology and LCD screens, they could make keyboards with just one slider and some buttons; to adjust a parameter, one would have to navigate a menu. Users of cell phones (and indeed car stereos) can relate, I’m sure. This drove down costs, to be sure, but dropped a wet blanket on intuitive and/or real time synth programming.

Thankfully, recently synth manufacturers have realized that knobs and sliders are good things after all, and most modern keyboards have several of them–maybe not one per parameter, but enough to improve ergonomics significantly.

I am still waiting for car stereo manufacturers to have the same epiphany.

Hey, guys! You might want to imagine that on some unique day, some unique person might want to, oh, I dunno, OPERATE THE STEREO WHILE THEY ARE DRIVING!

That is all.

2

Image Dynamics makes an excellent graphic EQ if you can find a place to put it. As for in dash, Audiocontrol makes some good ones, but only 5 bands.

3

I friggin hate after-market car stero ergonomics. Give me a couple of knobs to turn instead. I looked in vain for a plain MP3 compatible stereo.

4

I wasn’t around in the 70’s, nor have I used 70’s synths. With all those knobs n’ things, could you save your programming as a preset? If not, wouldn’t current synths be far superior in that area? With todays synths, I can just call up my saved preset and be ready to go. Could you do that with the old style?

5

No, presets as we know them today were not available on the older synths. Indeed, on the modular instruments of the late sixties/early seventies (you know, the ones with huge panels bristling with patch cables), one would have to physically repatch the cables in order to get new sounds–hence the still prevalent usage of the word patch to mean a synth program. And it goes without saying that you weren’t going to get a decent piano sound out of them–indeed, up until the early-to-mid seventies, they were only capable of playing one note at a time! (so anytime you hear synth chords on a song of that era–say, the Beatles’ Because from Abbey Road, or the early records of Wendy Carlos or Tomita–know that each note of the chord had to be painstakingly recorded on its own track).

So in that respect, the newer instruments had the edge. But when these instruments hit big time–Yamaha’s DX-7, and later Korg’s M1 and Roland’s D-50, there was a definite shift towards people simply using the presets or buying third party sounds instead of programming their own–the operating systems, particularly in the case of the DX-7, were simply too obtuse for most people to bother with programming them.

Nowadays, keyboardists have the best of all worlds–instruments with knobs dedicated to the most important aspects of programming, menus for the fiddly stuff, huge banks of memory to store sounds, virtual analog synthesis to get the older-type sounds plus onboard samples for emulation of real instruments. It’s a great time to be a keyboardist. Synth manufacturers have got it right.

Now if only manufacturers of other fiddly devices could follow their lead . . .

::glares balefully at Kenwood::

6

I, too, am annoyed by car stereo ergonomics. I even started a thread asking if there were brands that didn’t have the problems you mention, but didn’t really get any satisfaction. I still haven’t bought a stereo.

When enough people respond to this thread, let’s mail it to Alpine, Kenwood, Clarion, Blaupunkt, etc and tell them to pull their heads out of their asses.