Please 'Boom' Responsibly As most of you have noticed, the noise ordinances have become much tougher lately. Most of this is due to idiots, yes IDIOTS, who drive through residential areas with their windows down while their system is playing at full power. To make things worse, the music they listen to has all sorts of foul language that's not suitable for small children, (who may be playing outside). There are even a few people, who are even beyond idiot status, that play their systems at full power through residential areas after 10:00 PM (when many people go to bed). I don't believe that this type of behavior is good for the industry. If the fines get too stiff, people will stop buying large systems. If this happens, more people will get out of car audio (who wants a mediocre system). People get interested in things because they're exciting. A deck and four 6.5" speakers are not going to interest many of the younger car audio enthusiasts. If car audio enthusiasts keep annoying more and more people, the fines will keep getting tougher. All of this will only reduce interest in the equipment that fuels the industry. If you want to listen to your system at full volume, get out on the highway where there's little chance of bothering anyone. When you get to a red light, turn it down. If the only thing attractive about you is your 'system', you have some work to do. Bottom line... Think about what you're doing. Think about other people. It's not the end of the world if you have to turn the volume down for a little while.

Bass and Treble:
The bass and treble controls act sorta like a 2 band equalizer. The bass control is usually set to vary the level of audio in a band of frequencies centered around 100 hertz. The treble control acts similarly but its band is centered around 10,000 hertz. There are a couple of different kinds of 'curves'. The following diagram shows a 'shelving' tone control. You can see how there is a wide range of frequencies where the boost is constant until you reach the 'slope' of the curve. Most head units claim to vary the level by plus or minus 10dB (as is shown in the diagram). In reality the range may be only +/-7dB or as high as +/-12dB. As the level of the control is increased or decreased the band of affected frequencies widens.

In this diagram, the red section is the response curve at 0 to +10dB boost (in 2dB increments) for the bass control. The blue is the same for the bass cut. The yellow is treble boost and the green is the treble cut. As you can see, this type of curve covers a lot of frequencies at full boost or cut.
This next diagram shows another boost/cut response curve that's not as common as the first but is used on some equipment. Its curves are similar to those that you'd get with an equalizer.

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