Comment by fifticon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fifticon | Hacker News Reader

This is evident in physical products. We have perfected 'crap for the masses', unfortunately. Standard problems: - I just bought a (bulk) phone charging station. Even though I attempted to pay more to get a non-shitty product, it has no on/off button. Instead, I can unplug it manually from the socket each morning :-/.

- music volume: When I stream music from my android phone to one of our not-cheap bluetooth speakers, the volume can be adjusted in something like 16 possible increments. In practice, there are 3-4 possibilities: (A) so low you can't hear anything, and the frequency distribution is off. (B) almost but not quite audible. (C) audible, but a bit too loud. (D) so loud you fear structural damage to your kitchen. In practice, I toggle back and forth between B and C, and wish just that interval had analog subdivisions.

- two relatively expensive bluetooth speakers (sigh) in our house have no 'tangible' power buttons, only icon-marked areas where you can hover your finger for the same effect. I lack words to describe how annoying it is to have to visually ascertain your finger is near where the almost-invisible icon is. I have marked them with nail-polish, but it is not enough. They are both cylinder-shaped, so there are 360 choices.

As I see it, there should be good money to make, in just offering physical knobs on your gadget, and possibly analog controls.

As a caveat, precisely the physical knobs have often been the failure points in expensive Hi-Fi gear I've owned over the years, in particular the channel/input selector, and the volume controls. Sigh.

Glomming onto your comment to add my gripes with the Google home speakers I now deeply regret installing in every room in my house:

1. Touching the speakers adjusts their volume. They are convex hulls with no handles, and there are no visible markers indicating where they are sensitive to this input, so moving them while in operation is dangerous: they are as likely to hit 100% volume as 0%.

2. Alternatively, volume can be adjusted verbally: "Hey Google, set volume to 10 percent." However, I ended up covering my newborn's ears and running out of a room recently when the speaker didn't understand the "percent." That's how I discovered that you can also say "set volume to N," with N being 0-10, and the speaker will multiply by ten to get a percent. This decision is baffling for a voice interface, which could have consistency and user safety by treating all inputs as percentages. As it stands, 1% = too quiet to hear, 1 = quiet, 10% = quiet, and 10 = so loud the speaker cannot hear you say "hey Google, stop."

Here is a tip for your hi-fi gear: get a can of De-Oxit D5. The common mode of failure for those 'knobs' is the potentiometers getting gunk and oxidization on their carbon traces. They work by sliding fingers over a carbon trace which increases making resistance change as it moves on the circle (or line, for slide pots). Also, since they rely on physical contact between two surfaces, it helps tremendously to have a non-interfering lubrication between them. De-Oxit D5 has a contact cleaner in aerosol which flushes gunk out and it leaves behind a compound which prevents corrosion and lubricates electronic contacts. It is in the bag of every tech who works regularly with hi-fi gear.

Note this applies to analog controls. Digital controls use rotary encoders which only indicate which direction the dial has been moved.

Ah, you've encountered a non-logarithmically-scaled volume control in the wild. All too common I'm afraid. https://dcordero.me/posts/logarithmic_volume_control.html

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