Features Existing Gear Needs

[MikeRivers]

 

I would suggest that, considering how few folks feel as you do about printed manuals these days that a much more responsible approach would be to not include a printed manual but allow qualified users to purchase the manual at cost from an on-demand source

 

This is essentially what you can do now, and what I've done occasionally. I can send the PDF manual to Kinko's, and a couple of hours later, pick up a printed copy. But it bothers me that I have to do that, and that I have to pay for what I think I should rightfully get, as part of the cost of the product. The company has already spent most of the cost of the manual in writing it. If 1 out of 100 users requested a printed copy, I don't think that would break them, or require that all the other users who don't care about a printed copy to pay for a portion of mine. The word "manual" is (or at least could be) derived from "hand" - as you're holding the documentation in your hand.

 

I will say that, particularly in the case of printed manuals, I've been extremely underwhelmed by the indexes in many manuals.

 

Well, yeah. But there are good manuals and bad manuals. It doesn't matter how they're delivered.

 

When electronic publications management first started revolutionizing the print industry in the late 70s and particularly in the 80s, I naively assumed that would mean a big increase in the completeness and effectiveness of document indexes. But the reality was considerably more perverse. It seemed like the quality of indexes actually went downhill through the 80s and into the 90s -- probably because the highly trained pros who used to do document indexing 'by hand' were forced out by cost-cutting and replaced by electronic document management jockies who'd never had any experience in constructing indexes the 'old-fashioned' way.

 

I've told Word to create me an index, and it's full of all sorts of crap, and half the size of the document. In order to create a useful index, you need to understand the product so you'll know what a user needs to look up. In fact, in order to write a good manual, you need to understand the product. But I suspect that a lot of manuals that we see nowadays are either just translated from their original language, or are written by someone who doesn't know the product, but is working from product specifications which tell him how it's supposed to work. That's actually a good way to start a manual, but you can't write a thorough and accurate manual if that's all you're working from.

 

Just give me the opportunity to do a search on the raw contents myself. That's all I ask. That's often far superior to what you get in various online help/doc indexed searches.

 

Isn't that essentially what you do when you type a word in the FIND box in a PDF reader? But you have to know what to look for. I even have that problem with my own files on my computer. I was looking for a PDF that I made for the last camp that contained tablature for some guitar runs and transitions for backing up fiddle players. I couldn't remember what I had named the file and couldn't find it. Finally I let Windows search for "guitar" and, because I don't have a wealth of files with names that contain "guitar" it got me to the right place. (It was named FiddleTuneGuitarBackupTabs.PDF by the way) So I guess it's nice that the capability was there to do that.

 

One of the things that would make manuals more sensible is to make products that aren't so complicated and feature-rich. But that'll never happen.

[blue2blue]

If a manufacturer wants to add to the purchase cost of a device in order to subsidize free manual printing for the few, that's entirely within their purview. (But, sadly, in this world, competitive price points are seen as so important that many companies remove features or other niceties in order to maintain price points.)

 

As long as a bunch of unnecessary manuals that no one wants aren't printed, though, I'm cool with however they want to approach it.

 

When I sold my house, I had the experience of collecting together about 15 years of industry publications, my own home print outs from my pre-LCD days, free-whether-you-want-them-or-not magazines from the Auto Club, and more than a few old newspapers that had articles in them I had been originally convinced I must read... I'm pretty sure it was close to a half ton. (For some years I had subscriptions to GP, Keyboard, EQ, Mix, EM, and some others, not to mention subscriptions to my old city paper and the LA Times in an era when the dailies were an 1-1/2" thick and the Sundays as fat as a hard bound desk dictionary -- of course, the newspapers mostly went out all the time, had to.)

 

It really made an impression on me. I had to spread the recycling pick ups over three weeks. At that point, I decided to go as paperless as possible.

[Philter]

Let me turn this around and bring up something no audio gear should have: fans. You hear me, Digidesign? When I buy a $3000 audio interface, I don't want it to make a whirring, humming sound in my control room! Hiding it in a closet is a lame solution, because I just paid $3000 for it!

[nat whilk II]

I'm not enough of an EE to describe this well, but maybe I can get it across:

 

This should be a standard feature for all audio inputs/outputs: when a jack is plugged in or out, the action should somehow trigger some sort of signal attenuator that cuts the signal before the actual contact is made/broken. And ramps it back on a slow-enough curve to save the equipment and human ears, etc.

 

How it would work would be an engineer's design puzzle. Maybe just skin contact would trigger it - maybe you'd have to squeeze the jack just a tad to enable it to go in or be removed...I dunno...

 

just send me 90% of the royalties on the invention and you deal with the details, thanx

 

nat whilk ii

[MikeRivers]

 

If a manufacturer wants to add to the purchase cost of a device in order to subsidize free manual printing for the few, that's entirely within their purview.

 

Sadly, most of the manufacturers are on your side of the fence here, considering the manual to be something that they can leave out to save a few dollars. Apparently too many people have said "I never read the manual."

 

But, sadly, in this world, competitive price points are seen as so important that many companies remove features or other niceties in order to maintain price points.

 

Sometimes it's more insidious than that. They remove features from the "lite" version so they can sell the "full" version at a higher price. This is particularly true with software. The code is already written, but I guess they realize that there are some people who won't pay what the manufacturer thinks is the proper price for the full version, so better to get a little of their money (or of a hardware vendor's money, who includes the lite version along with the hardware) than to get none.

 

When I sold my house, I had the experience of collecting together about 15 years of industry publications . . . .

 

I don't know what I'm going to do about my collection, and the four file drawers full of catalogs and data sheets from 30 years of NAMM and AES shows (plus the more than 2 foot high stack of press releases and catalogs on CD). When I was writing articles monthly for Recording, I'd frequently go back to my issues of RE/P from the 1975-1985 period to get ideas to write about. I've decided that Mix magazines from about 2000 on don't have anything lasting in them, so I've started thinning those out, and in the past few years I've started getting the AES Journals on CD rather than paper (I rarely read those magazines, but sometimes will look up an article for reference). At about a dollar a pound to move stuff, it'll probably stay with the house when, where, and however I go.

 

But I really DO like manuals and have quite a full bookshelf of them.

[MikeRivers]

 

Let me turn this around and bring up something no audio gear should have: fans. You hear me, Digidesign? When I buy a $3000 audio interface, I don't want it to make a whirring, humming sound in my control room!

 

There are ways to make fans quiet enough to work with, as long as you don't have too many of them. A $3,000 piece of gear should have something better than a $1.50 fan in it. But as Blue and I have been yammering about, price point is critical. You can probably improve the fan situation yourself, on your own nickel. My Mackie recorders were too noisy but I fixed them with fifty cents worth of parts. If Digidesign did it right they'd probably put in a $25 fan and a few dollars worth of ductwork. By the time the bean counters got through adding up the beans, it would probably be a $3150 box.

 

I think that every piece of gear needs a price tag high enough so it can be really good all around for the price, not just good for the (slightly lower) price.

[MikeRivers]

 

OK, I'll play: as a guitarist I'm inclined to desire a coiltap, a coil split and phase reverse switch be standard operating equipment on every humbucker style pickup. Push-Pull Volume knob could be the tap, Push-Pull Tone could be the split, and a seperate Rythym/Both/Treble type switch for the phase reverse: Up for both coils out of phase, midlle for one coil in phase,one coil out of phase: down for both coils out of phase. HHHHHHHmmmmmmm.....

 

But without an instruction manual, because everybody knows how to work an electric guitar. You just turn the knobs and flip the switches until you find the tone you want. Then you wait until you get famous and someone can write about your tone in Guitar Player. When you read the article you can say "Oh! Is THAT what I did??? Cool!!"

[philbo]

 

Here's another one: Can we decide once and for all whether a red LED means you're actually clipping, or about to clip? I've seen gear handle it both ways. Personally, I prefer having it light a dB or two prior to clipping. You should be leaving at least that much headroom anyway, and if there's no red - no clipping.

 

 

I kind of like the way my Ramsa console handles it - - red light means 8 dB below clipping.

 

It doesn't have any other color (it was built before multi-color LEDs came out). That would be nice....

[timrocker]

The Fender Super Champ XD would be such a dyno tiny amp if it had a midrange control. I know, they couldn't include it and keep that price point. But they did include a line level out, and the several times I've used it the output was gruesome. It sounds look poopie through a PA, and I doubt if many people really need to daisy chain a Fender Super Champ XD into another amp. It just isn't that kind of amp. No one is ever going to use this line level out to record either. You'd hate every note. So, in light of that, the amp would have been vastly better with a midrange control instead of a line level out.

[eeglug]

Setting up a computer-based DAW can be a pain, hunting for software and hardware that all work together, worrying about the specs of your computer, drivers and OS's, eliminating latency.

 

Back in the day, I was actually pretty fast with my Akai DPS16 standalone recorder and editing wasn't as bad as you might expect on that small screen - even without a mouse. I sometimes wonder what it would mean to go back to a machine like that - and then I remember I'd miss my plugins. So I figure that I might actually consider going standalone again if they could only just load and run VST fx and instruments. Don't know if that's possible but I think it could reinvigorate that market if someone could pull it off.

[temnov]

Every software plugin should update itself error-free in most convenient time for engineer (overnight?). If there is a problem software sends a warning to owner offering a manual update.

 

We can consider software as a "virtual gear", right?