May it af­flict in­ter­mit­tent left-channel out­ages, and an au­dio­phile neigh­bor who lives for op­eretta, on the gorm­less en­thu­si­asts who mal­ad­just the au­dio in the car-share cars so ev­ery­thing sounds like a Bad Hair Band.

Modern car-audio sys­tems are tuned by pro­fes­sion­als to sound rea­son­able out of the box. Maybe you like a lit­tle more punch in the bass, good on ya. Maybe you’re lis­ten­ing to talk ra­dio in a stat­icky zone, you want to lift the mid-range and back off the tre­ble; who could ob­jec­t?

But what is the per­va­sive pathol­o­gy that leaves ap­prox­i­mate­ly 50% of all car-share ve­hi­cles with the bass and tre­ble cranked right up, and the fad­er di­aled to the back-seat? Maybe they’re us­ing the mu­sic for vi­bra­tional dan­druff ther­a­py? Maybe it’s the right way to lis­ten to Nick­el­back? Maybe I have a neme­sis who spies on my reser­va­tions and sneaks around to sab­o­tage the sound just be­fore I get in?

I have learned to Fix The Sound in the park­ing spot be­fore I mind-meld with the rush-hour. Be­cause I care about good sound, but not enough to die for it.



Contributions

Comment feed for ongoing:Comments feed

From: John Cowan (Dec 22 2015, at 05:04)

It's pretty much the same story in NYC taxicabs, so either taxi drivers like it that way, or (they think) their passengers do. I'm constantly telling drivers to put the sound up front; they usually just turn it off, which is fine with me too.

[link]

From: Michael (Dec 22 2015, at 08:11)

I'm pretty sure Car2Go resets everything when you return the car. The other day I fiddled with things a bit and turned the radio off when I parked the car. Ended up taking the same car home 5 minutes later and the radio turned itself on with the horrid settings as soon as I turned on the car.

Infuriating.

[link]

author · Dad · software · colophon · rights
picture of the day
December 21, 2015
· Arts (11 fragments)
· · Music (90 more)
· Technology (77 fragments)
· · Audio (19 more)
· The World (107 fragments)
· · Wrath of Heaven (9 more)

By .

I am an employee
of Amazon.com, but
the opinions expressed here
are my own, and no other party
necessarily agrees with them.

A full disclosure of my
professional interests is
on the author page.