balance?

[Phil Leigh]

Phil,

I'm curious if you are challenging the need for some people at all or you are trying to get a sense of the importance of it to determine if you believe the feature is one that should be added.

The device has a headphone out on it.

I don't think it's unreasonable to think people might want or expect some of the basic functionality they seem to have in their other electronics that produce sound.

Now sure why so many people are defensive on the issue and are being so negative to the issue instead of just saying "Sure, I can see how people might benefit from this feature" and then just move on...

Killing peoples ideas and challenging them on their needs when you are a more Sr member alienates the new members. I'm just not sure why this community needs to say things like:



I think it would be better for Logitech to be making this kind of statement unless we enjoy being totally negative and want to help give customers the impression (real or not) that development on this new product is poorly supported and that they should just return the device....

/rant

No I wasn't challenging the absolute need for it - I don't see how you could read that into my post - as I said in an earlier post if people use Balance at all my experience is that they set the balance once and then leave it alone, rather than continuously fiddling with it.
Therefore, the most common use-case would be some way to trim the balance as more of a "one-off exercise" (unlike volume).

I haven't touched a balance control in nearly 20 years, personally. (Anyway, My TACT takes care of that automatically these days..and much more accurately than I would by hand/ear - and it's not just a matter of level but also time delay if you are using speakers that are asymmetric to your listening position).

I understand that some folk have a hearing imbalance and so would benefit. I was just trying to ascertain how readily accessible/easy to use such a feature needed to be.

I have no issue at all with the feature being added.

[pounce]

Thanks for the clarification. Your question:

Do you really adjust balance a lot/often?

..does come across a bit challenging, but forums are silent and we don't have any visual cues to know how we mean things. I think the 'really' in the question gave the tone.

[pippin]

Well, the main point here is what Erland mentioned: It is probably very easy to implement a balance control on the Touch itself, it's much more challenging to make this remotely controllable.

The one thing I'm fearing here is that we are getting a lot of these examples: Things you can do on the device itself but which you can't control remotely.
This would drastically reduce usability and value of the Squeezeboxes for me. The sole reason I bought into the Squeezebox universe is the fact that I could do everything remotely. The Touch already now is a big step back in that respect, not through TinySC (which can be remotely controlled event though I don't like the fact that it lacks a WebUI) but through Applets like iPlayer which can not.

[Phil Leigh]

Thanks for the clarification. Your question:



..does come across a bit challenging, but forums are silent and we don't have any visual cues to know how we mean things. I think the 'really' in the question gave the tone.

Not really. It's merely a term of amplification. You'll know when I am really challenging something. I think I've made enough posts on these fora by now for people to gauge things 99% of the time.

[pfarrell]

Daverz wrote:
> pfarrell;540023 Wrote:
>> And a more modern solution to this problem is to use an audio editor
>> on the data file, and adjust it once.

> Balance is very subjective and easiest done with a remote from the
> listening position. Not everyone is set up to do this conveniently
> with a DAW.

This is the touch forum. Its hard to see how you need to adjust the
balance much if you are close enough to use the touch screen.

A decade about, I would agree that not everyone could use a DAW. Even
inexpensive ones cost $100 and good ones were close to a grand.

But these days, thee are lots of free and low cost tools, most without
the complexity of a DAW of old.

But I point this approach out as a solution fof 80% of the folks who
might actually have this problem, and who don't want to wait three to
five years for Logitech to implement one.

Add an RFE is free, and as always, patches welcome.

--
Pat Farrell
http://www.pfarrell.com/

[pfarrell]

pounce wrote:
> I'm curious if you are challenging the need for some people at all or
> you are trying to get a sense of the importance of it to determine if
> you believe the feature is one that should be added.

I'm not Phil, but unless shown otherwise, I think its a feature of low
value for 99% of the customers. And because of that, its not going to be
high on the Logitech engineer's priority list.

Since the code is open source, of course, someone else who thinks its
important can implement it.


> THE DEVICE HAS A HEADPHONE OUT ON IT.

I completely don't follow this. Of course it has a headphone output, and
if you use headphones, the one big argument that sometime you are not
sitting in the sweet spot goes right out the window.


> I don't think it's unreasonable to think people might want or expect
> some of the basic functionality they seem to have in their other
> electronics that produce sound.

I have no problems with people wanting it. And I expect that it will
happen sometime.


> Now sure why so many people are defensive on the issue

I'm not negative on this issue, but I believe I'm being realistic.
Adding a minor feature that will make a tiny percentage of the potential
purchasing customers change their mind is not high on the priority list
of any product company.

>> ...But don't hold your breath waiting or it...
>
> I think it would be better for Logitech to be making this kind of
> statement

Logitech never comments on future plans. They won't talk about it.

Again, this is a customer cooperative help forum. It is not where you go
for official support or for official product specifications.



--
Pat Farrell
http://www.pfarrell.com/

[pounce]

If this was really needed via remote I would imagine the two options would be using a Controller or using a universal remote. Implementing with a Controller would probably be the the most ideal since you would pick up a lot of functionality and would be dealing with SqueezeOS on both devices, but more costly for the end user. A universal remote could add some IR codes which could then be passed into the event system to address balance. I looked for documentation on the IR events, but didn't find much. I did not look through the code or see if this code is public.

[pounce]

> THE DEVICE HAS A HEADPHONE OUT ON IT. [/color]

I completely don't follow this. Of course it has a headphone output, and
if you use headphones, the one big argument that sometime you are not
sitting in the sweet spot goes right out the window.

When you are using the headphone out there isn't even a chance of other customer equipment between the Touch and the listener. This means that there is typically no way to put the issue of some form of balance control on the customer by using their receiver etc. This means that if a person is listening off the headphone jack and is in need of some balance control due to a a situation (bootleg live concert, hearing problem etc) they don't have any ability to do so.

When comparing the use cases for a balance control it's a little easier to lower the priority when you look at the outputs to customer equipment like the spdif's and analog out. The point is that when you consider the use case of the headphone jack the onus is on the Touch almost completely.

Does that help?

[pippin]

If this was really needed via remote I would imagine the two options would be using a Controller or using a universal remote. Implementing with a Controller would probably be the the most ideal since you would pick up a lot of functionality and would be dealing with SqueezeOS on both devices, but more costly for the end user. A universal remote could add some IR codes which could then be passed into the event system to address balance. I looked for documentation on the IR events, but didn't find much. I did not look through the code or see if this code is public.

It would not work with the controller either without a plugin. Squeezeplay devices can't talk to each other directly but only through a server.

[pounce]

It would not work with the controller either without a plugin.

I was really suggesting something native.