I have a Toyota Highlander with an automatic climate control system that totally baffles me. The issue concerns the option to either bring in fresh air or recirculate the cabin air.
Consider what happens if I keep the system in "auto" mode. When I get in the car on a hot summer day, it's blisteringly hot inside the cabin. When I turn the car on, the air recirculation mode goes on. So, instead of bringing in the relatively cool outside air, the car recirculates the much hotter cabin air and tries to cool that down.
Later, when the cabin air finally cools to a comfortable temperature, the system goes from recirculation mode to fresh air mode. So now, instead of recirculating the cool cabin air, it tries to cool down the much hotter outside air.
When I get in the car on a cold day, the cabin air, while cold, is still much warmer than the air outside. When it's cold, the system always picks the fresh air mode. So, instead of trying to heat up the cabin air, it tries to heat up the much colder outside air. Of course, I can almost always override the programmed choice by manually hitting the cabin air recirculation mode button.
I say "almost always," because if it is very cold outside -- less than 32F -- the cabin air recirculation button is disabled. That means it takes much longer to heat up the really frigid fresh air. Apparently, the system is worried that with cabin air recirculation, I might mist up the window and not be smart enough to turn it off or turn on the defroster. I can think of no circumstance where the system's choice is any other than the opposite of what would make sense.
This entry was submitted by Michael Holtz and edited by Rob Spiegel.
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Most of my music listening is in the car. I have music on in the house, but it's on while I'm working, so I don't listen closely. In the car, CD technology was a major improvement over tape. So, while I understadn that vinyl is superior, I don't get a chance to listen to vinyl often.
I hate it when I get asked a toucgh question. I think it was a chevy impala that I had. The feature was called auto volume. Kind of a neat idea. But it didn't really work the way they said it would. It "sounded" like a good idea, though.
Another Neil Young fan! Yes, I've heard him complain about digital sound, but not at that detail level. I can definitely tell the difference. Those who say humans can't obviously can't themselves and may be working with averages, not the total Bell curve population that includes extreme outliers. If I could afford it, all my sound equipment would be older-audiophile stuff. OTOH, I think some classical music sounds a lot better on CD, especially strings and harpsichord. I can also tell the difference, although it keeps getting harder to do, between digital and analog photos.
What the human eye and ear do perceive, aided of course by the brain, is the Gestalt, the total picture or sound cluster, even if they can't perceive the discrete components. Theoretically, higher sampling rates would remove much of the choppiness.
Yes, digital chunks. Neil Young has long complained about this. He insists digital recording can't capture the sound of an acounstic guitar accurately because there are a gazillion digital breaks in the sound. Some say the human ear can't hear the fact that digital sound is made up of pixels (just as we can't see the dots in color printing). Young disagrees. He insists you can tell the difference between pixelated music and the sustained sound of alalog recordings.
jmiller, that takes the cake. Who could have thought anyone wants volume to change with changes in car speed?! No relationship at all. Do you remember what make and model that was?
Speaking of backwards climate control systems, my ongoing litany of complaints about my 1980 Dodge with the deep-dish steering wheel (I can't remember the name of the car, but deep dish wheels were on a bunch of Mopar products...too boat-like for my taste) included a climate control system where the cable connect that temperature control slider on the dash to the air mixing box underneath snapped. So to go from warm to cool and back again, I had to reach under the middle of the dash and move a vertical half-wheel back and forth to get the temp mixing door to open or shut. A fun thing to do at speed, though I got pretty good at it.
Yes, there's a difference. I hear it in acoustic guitar recordings. The vinyl has the warm hum, while the CD is crisp. From what you say, it sounds like the same problem occurs with the tremolo vocal. I would imagine it's the chunks of sound in the digital recording that hurts the warm sustained sound.
I probably shouldn't get started on the vastly reduced audio quality of MP3. Ecchh! I have a vinyl recording of Irish tenor Tommy Makem singing "The Wind That Shakes the Barley." It is the exact same recording as the one I later bought on CD. But on my 1987 excellent stereo with my husband's excellent speakers, the one on vinyl makes him sound like he's a few feet away from you in a club and you can hear his goosebump-inducing incredible voice doing that subtle tremolo thing. All of that is lacking in the CD recording, which I was surprised, and disappointed, to discover. That experience is what really made me realize how bad MP3 is, no matter which bit rate.
Reading your comment reminds of a similar useless feature in a previous vehicle I had where the volume would "adjust" to louder or softer as the velocity of the car increased or decreased. The thought of course was this would be a convenience to the driver turning the volume up as the car went faster and the volume down when the car slowed. In the end the best part about this feature was the fact that I could shut it off.
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