Stereo Tool

Many consumer-oriented products have genre-based preset naming. While I appreciate that you are broadcast-oriented, and thus genre-based naming is not all that important to you and/or you can try presets until you find the one you like and/or can make your own preset, the idea of having genre-based presets is a valid request, particularly for the home audio segment and novice hobbyists.

You can look at it similarly to how the UI has the various modes (Simple, Basic, Advanced, Expert, Extreme Tweaker) that were just recently added. I think that addition was made at the request of hobbyist / home listeners as well as some broadcasters / DJs that wanted enough controls to do what they needed, but not have all of the controls visible.

Personally, my opinion is that the whole preset process needs an overhaul. Hans needs to delegate control of presets to the developers of the presets, and perhaps a select few individuals as a "review board" of sorts. This would free up some of his time.

Basic rules would be:

- Generic: No paid features, non-FM bandpass (LPF up to maximum or bandpass off), and possibly an output RMS target range, but no other restrictions (specifically talking about things like my Hard Limit disagreement).

- Web: Non-FM bandpass, but no other restrictions.

- FM: FM bandpass (LPF up to 16K range), whatever restrictions there are about oversampling and composite clippers.

The preset menu is very cluttered right now, with presets from Jeroen, D.R.Z, and several others that were originally designed for FM broadcasting that have been pushed into the other groups. Maybe there could be ONE preset in the Generic or Web sections that had LPF set down to 15K, but a LPF at that level is generally used for FM.

Alternatively, if the FM broadcasters want to ensure that their presets still sound good when being used as a generic, then that needs to be upon them. My guess is that right now, people making FM presets aren't testing how they sound as a generic.

As for a review board, it needs to be people who have proven to have relatively good hearing and good understanding of at least audio fundamentals. There would need to be reviews for all three types of presets.

Using myself as an example, I think I'd be able to review Generic and Web, but not FM. I'd also want others for those sections, and specifically someone who looks at things from a remastering perspective, as that would be my weakness.