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What's the most useless, over-designed, or badly designed feature ?

darTZeel wins on the best features, though :D

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JHS2RT said:
Those little slide indicators or pointers on the Pioneer 1280 & 1980 where you can mark a station.
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Sorry, I must respectfully disagree. My 980 has them and I find them useful - not preset tuner useful, but at least you can spin over to the exact spot on the dial you want, quickly and without a lot of focus on what you're doing.
 
Not to fond of Yamaha's BX-1's convaluted driver board design with 4 adjustments for the DC offset per unit. Remember the BX-1 is a mono block.
 
ManFromPorlock said:
Station presets with no way to mark what station's in what preset. This is all of them, AFAIK.
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In the 1930's and 40's it used to be quite common to label presets with station names.

At some point in the 80's "presets" somehow became a "new & high-tech" feature. Just lacked any means to label them.
 

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electronjohn said:
Those funky twist-lock speaker connectors on Technics units. A close second would be Pioneer's nearly-always-missing proprietary speaker plugs.
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What what what? :o

That is the best speaker connector I've ever encountered. I love them.

Makes me really sad that Technics gear is not good or good looking enough, I would love to have one as my main amp simply because of those speaker connectors.

As for useless features, I think the tape dubbing/tape 2/tape source/tape bla bla things are a nuisance. I genuinely don't see a use for them. For copying tapes? I always used a ghetto blaster for that kind of thing.
 
Two phono inputs, Two tape loops, and one Aux input. Maybe it made sense 30 years ago.
 
SoCal Sam said:
Sounds like a fancy filter to me.
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No, it was not really a filter. If you understand a speakers radiation pattern, and how sound hits the ear, this circuit makes perfect sense.

When a speaker disperses sound(let's say the right speaker), the sound hits both of our ears no matter if it is coming from the left or right speaker. If the sound is coming from the right speaker, the sound will hit the right ear first, and a delayed sound(it has to travel around our heads) will hit the left ear as well. So you have sound from the right speaker delayed and hitting the left ear, and the sound from the left speaker delayed and hitting the right ear. This is called inter-aural crosstalk, and it can narrow the front sound stage anywhere from a little(depending on microphone placement in the recording) to a lot.

The Carver Sonic Holography circuit sends out a delayed opposite ear output from the speakers that is designed to cancel inter aural crosstalk by sending a bit of out of phase right speaker output to the left ear, and visa versa to the right ear. Depending on the layout of the drivers on the front baffle, the effect can be uncanny, to very subtle. If you speaker have a vertically aligned speaker layout on the front baffle, you get the full effect of the circuit( the best results). If the drivers are staggered off of the center line of the baffle, then the effect is very subtle at best. Time, phase and frequency correct speakers benefit highly from the circuit, and non time, frequency and phase speakers not so much. The timing of the front wave hitting the ears is very important to get the best from this circuit, it is very phase dependent.
 
JohnVF said:
Except it doesn't really work in practice, and you end up with a phase-y sounding result. I've heard similar attempts to do this that have worked better, such as that employed in some of Van L Speakerworks speakers.
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The SH circuit and the ambience recovery system of the Speakerworks speaker operate very differently. The SH circuit sends an anti phase signal to each speaker, and the Speakerworks ambience recovery system sends a L-R, and R-L output to the drivers. One is designed to pull out of phase signals out of the recording, the other to send out a phase cancelling signal from opposing speakers.


The Speakerworks recovery system send the out of phase output out of the back side of a dual voice coil driver. The SH circuit sends an opposing anti-phase signal through the front of the drivers along with the in phase output of the driver.

Both approaches require time and phase driver relationships to work their best, and how one interprets the effect both is highly subjective in nature.

When the SH circuit is used with time, phase and frequency correct speakers, it does not exhibit the phase-y quality that you speak of. However when used with speakers that are not time coherent, it will. The staggered arrival of the signals from the different drivers located on the front baffle interfere with the working of the circuit, which knocks the arrival of the anti-phase signal
 
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