Another feature of the PMA450 I like is you have a choice of music muting modes. Normal setting will mute the music anytime the radio or intercom is active. I find this a bit annoying because the music will mute anytime someone breathes into their mike, or the air vents blowing in your face cause the intercom to become active.
The mode I use is "karaoke" which does not mute the music when the other comms activate. For this, I just set the music volume to a comfortable background level so I can hear it, ATC, and passengers and the music doesn't interfere.
We have an older PS Engineering audio panel in our Skylane. Whatever the last model was that had a manual squelch. 7000 I think? 6000? It sits there and runs, and I don't even know, because it just works.
I like to sing along too, and when I bother to dig out the audio cable, since our only way to "share music" is hard wired, anyone on board gets to "enjoy" that. LOL.
One of the ironically HUGE pluses of the old panels with manual squelch though, is that if I know nobody wants to hear me, I can just reach over and crank up only my squelch. Hahaha. The other squelch ring can remain right where it is. (This is also handy for exceedingly noisy mics... can turn up the right/back seater' squelch to kill the noise until we figure out who's head has a vent pointed straight at it and I can still talk to them to explain what is happening.)
To each his own but voice control is here to stay. You use Siri on your phone?
Nope. I've been an iPhone user since early days before Siri and I still rarely talk to my phone. If I need to do voice to text I'll do that, but the most I've used Siri in years is to hear Easter eggs.
Hint: Tell Siri: "I see a little silhouette-o of a man..."
I wouldn't lose any value if Siri suddenly went away. No interest in Alexa or whatever Google's girly named gadget goes by, either.
Most of the time I tell the GPS to shut up. That'd be nice. "GPS, how about you tell me the street to turn on ONCE and then shut the hell up?"
"Ok, Nate. I'll shut up."
Gah.
Realistically what I do 99% of the time is just stream music to the Lightspeed. The only time I dig out the audio cable is if Karen and I are doing a very long XC together. Otherwise nobody wants to hear me singing. Haha.
One shocker was the other day I was really cranking the tunes (I have the Lightspeed set for the auto-ducking mode, but have done it both ways... it's a couple of seconds with a pencil or something pointy to switch the DIP switch) and something with very wide stereo separation came on, and for a second it made me tilt my head sideways wondering what was up, since everything in our airplane is mono.
Then I realized the A2DP streaming is stereo on the Lightspeed even when the headset is in mono mode. LOL.
But I have to say, I really hate the audio shaping Garmin does for "intelligibility" pushing the midrange. At least in the audio portions of their com radios. It works, but I'm an old radio head and know what AM aircraft and a whole bunch of other modulation types sound like generally unmodified and my ears are tuned for that. The flat blah of Garmin audio sucks.
That plus the incredible longevity and solid performance of our current PS product, and every one I've ever used installed in anything, leads me to say I'll probably always lean their way for audio panels, even if I can't avoid the hideous Garmin audio coming from the radios themselves once we put the GTN in. The PS products leave the audio alone and just amplify it. Or so my ears tell me. (I won't say I've been so anal to bust out the audio sweep generator and a service monitor and swept the thing, but it's close. I just MIGHT sweep the difference between the GTN and the King that'll stay as Comm 2 sometime after that install just to see how truly nasty Garmins analog audio shaping is.)
Even if we go "all Garmin" on other stuff, I doubt they could convince me to buy their audio panel ever.
@mscheuer will probably like that. No, I don't care if the GPS touch screen can control it or not. Not in the slightest.
About the only nit-picky audio gripe of the older PS products I can even come up with is the mechanical output switching not having a snubbing circuit during the switch itself. POP. Every time you switch the main transmitter through whatever outputs are active. Headphones, speaker.
That should have been considered and the op amp disabled during switching. But it's common of stuff built in that era and would slow the switching process too. The newer stuff being solid state switched, no pops. Can't really complain. The thing was made when through-hole components were the only way to fly.
Learned one other "funny" today. Like most PS setups, ours is failsafed to the left seat jacks such that Com 1 goes there if you turn it off. For some reason today I wanted to turn off the audio panel and a couple seconds after I did it, practicing in the right seat for CFI stuff, I realized I had just turned off all my Com audio. LOL. Oops. Can also cut myself off from things sitting over there if I hit the pilot ISO switch instead of putting it into CREW.
Little things you don't think about until you're flying from your own right seat. Ha. Hmm. Audio weirdness. The audio panel thinks I should be sitting over there in that other empty seat.
