The emasculation of instruction manuals

[Studio Support Gnome]

https://www.flickr.com/photos/16491186@ ... n73t3UQCEr





Two manuals from same company , on gear that does broadly similar things , if anything the later model is more complicated and in need of greater explanation.

There are features and controls in the thing that no mention of exists in any document anywhere .

Dumbing down taken two steps too far

[Wonks]

The Behringerisation of instruction manuals. The ‘Quick Start’ guide you get is just that, but there’s never a full manual to follow.

[adrian_k]

So what is the point of a manufacturer spending time and money on developing features that presumably they think will differentiate them from the competition and then make those features effectively inaccessible? Might as well not bother. The world is getting weirder, if that’s possible.

[arkieboy]

Simple economics, really: why bother when half a dozen YouTubers are going to gush over your product and create video tutorials without you having to spend a penny.

Add to that, most of your userbase isn't actually going to read the manuals you provide, anyway ... even the lovely spiral bound G-System manual - a properly professional bit of kit whose manual you must have several copies of* - doesn't really get down in the weeds like the the unofficial Laird Williams guide** which didn't cost TC a penny to produce.

P*sses me off too, mind. But there you go - I don't think this forum is exactly representative of the guitar effects buying public.

----

*I have one too.

**Interested on your thoughts on gain staging, the boost function, and how you manage rhythm and solo levels if you don't use it.

[Studio Support Gnome]

I leave headroom for the boost function although I limit its use , I create patches for purposes and patch level discipline is iron clad , and …. I have a second processing stage keyed together with G system by midi , where I can correct overall level by patch and apply final dynamics and eq if necessary . Using Spdif out of Gsystem to Spdif input of G maj mk2 ensures I don’t clip the input stage of the G maj mk2 , paying attention to tonality and clip light in G system to stay on top of that. Critical given the output of my pickups .
I have to set things up carefully not to clip out before the time domain fx . I generally have a negative gain value at front end . To cope with quad rail , but that gives bags of headroom for the p-rail and single coil .

[Watchmaker]

Well that company was bought out by some larger conglomerate which is run by people who went to B-School, got their MBA and lost what little common sense they may have been born with.

Most likely the management team (i.e. Marketing, HR, and Accounting) have little to no real relationship with people who use their product - or even the product for that matter - and believe that electricity comes from the light switch.

These busy geniuses delegated the task to someone inexpensive who's probably inexperienced working for an over worked manager who's barely hanging on since the last round of redundancy left two people on the floor with an AI hand dryer in the bathroom that never works but says interesting things when no one's looking.

Call me a cynic, but the enshittefication of everything is pretty much down to the middling successes of petty, often narcissistic, people being allowed to manage businesses according to spreadsheets. The formula is: expenses down 3%, profits up 6%, Executive bonuses up 9% and dividends, excluding buybacks, up 25% every quarter. There, all done! grumble grumble. I've seen it up close too many times to disbelieve it.

It's been going back a long time. Marcus Aurelius and Cicero, among many August others, pondered over the abject obeisance of the average punter, which is probably a close approximation of the marketing intern given the task to write the engineering manual in as few, short, words as they can manage in three weeks. Given they are most likely marketing interns, as opposed to engineering interns, there is little hope for much beyond well meaning. /endrant

[adrian_k]

Spot on. And, as we know,

There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man’s lawful prey.

- J. A. Richards (or John Ruskin?)

[Kwackman]

Old man reminiscing…..
My Tascam 244 portastudio came with a great manual with helpful advice, especially for a beginner.
I also knew that 4 tracks was all I’d ever need…….
So, when I got my Fostex R8 I also got the matching MTC-1 to mate it with the Atari ST, but I really struggled with the MTC-1 manual. It seemed like a cryptic crossword, you KNEW the info was in those numbers and names, but it wasn’t easy!
There was a skill to writing manuals, probably a skill that has died out.

Reminiscing over, time for the Ovaltine and slippers…

[nathanscribe]

Some people still do a good job. I picked up a Tascam Model 12 last year and it came with a full printed manual. I upgraded Harrison Mixbus and their PDF manual is 967 pages. It's a long time since I saw a weighty tome bundled in print, which is presumably to keep costs down for production and shipping, but at least a PDF can be viewed on a phone or tablet and kept handy.

My particular gripe is those 'manuals' that are just single sheets with languages arranged like a jigsaw, that fold out like an OS map and have 6 point print – yet *still* don't manage to include useful information.

[Tomás Mulcahy]

Seems to me the user interface on the G Major is more opaque than the Plethora, so of course it would need more written instrcutions because it is less intuitive to use. How many languages published in the G Major manual?

Looks like a great way to (a) save trees and (b) give the user a better experience, to me.

[Studio Support Gnome]

Old man reminiscing…..
I really struggled with the MTC-1 manual. It seemed like a cryptic crossword, you KNEW the info was in those numbers and names, but it wasn’t easy!
There was a skill to writing manuals, probably a skill that has died out.

Reminiscing over, time for the Ovaltine and slippers…

old man my arse you young pup , I’ll have you know I remember when all this were just free electrons

There was a time before the cassette four track A dark time , of 1 or 2” tape reels and studio time , home and studio recording magazine , practical electronics. , of the knower trying to get his foot in the door of audio publishing , sleeping in his parents Volvo , working for no pay , when instruction manuals came complete with a small town library and required engineering degrees to read , …. And equipment to calibrate the subject of the manual , when real men wore brown work coats , flat caps and highly polished shoes Senior techs saved up and bought black doc martens , for the cushioning of the sole , essential to a positive mental attitude on a 16 hour shift . And the internet wasn’t even an academic dream yet .

Old man my arse.

[Kwackman]

old man my arse you young pup

My year old SENIOR bus pass says different!!

[Studio Support Gnome]

old man my arse you young pup

My year old SENIOR bus pass says different!!

Look , I’m trying to make you feel young and chipper again , before the horlicks weaves it’s insidious spell on you , waving around evidence that you’re almost ready to join the Soylent Green production team is not helping

[Kwackman]

Look , I’m trying to make you feel young and chipper again , before the horlicks weaves it’s insidious spell on you

[James Perrett]

So, when I got my Fostex R8 I also got the matching MTC-1 to mate it with the Atari ST, but I really struggled with the MTC-1 manual. It seemed like a cryptic crossword, you KNEW the info was in those numbers and names, but it wasn’t easy!
There was a skill to writing manuals, probably a skill that has died out.

I think my Fostex 4050 synchroniser was the first piece of gear that I bought that I never totally got to grips with thanks to the terrible manual. The guy in the shop even told me the manual was terrible when I bought it. I don't think the Fostex synchroniser team ever understood the skill of writing manuals because the later G24S synchroniser manual is just as bad.

Some people still do a good job. I picked up a Tascam Model 12 last year and it came with a full printed manual.

Maybe they learned from the Model 16 manual which was very poor in my opinion. It simply didn't explain how to set the mixer up for common tasks and even I struggled to see how to make it work.

[arkieboy]

I leave headroom for the boost function although I limit its use

Splendid. My instinct was that there was little noticeable impact on s/n with either the JMP1+EL84/20-20 at +4dB or with the buffered fx loop on the Hot Cat, but its good to get the endorsement.

To cope with quad rail

Not a problem I'll ever encounter. Both my preamps have more than enough gain for me with the Tonerider humbucker in the Hexacaster, and the JBs in my Eggles. But good to know it can cope.

Thanks

[arkieboy]

... also I don't mind PDF manuals, especially if they're long. <ctrl><f> is a wonderful thing, and I usually have some decent sized screen around, be that an iPad at rehearsal/gig or a Mac of some sort everywhere else.

If it saves the planet, reduces the cost, keeps the company afloat then fine by me.

[Studio Support Gnome]

I would certainly be okay if an in depth pdf manual existed , but for plethora X5 it doesn’t . The piece of multi lingual toilet roll is all there is , in both hard copy and electronic form . Several users have attempted to improve on it by creating a giant pdf with all the individual tone print pedal manuals as well as the original and firmware update notes , but the fundamental system settings are not really covered in depth , or at all in some cases . Notably the insert I/o is barely mentioned . Nothing explained about best use or the system settings for it , Very little useful discussion of various possible set up options , just “it’s so easy your knuckle dragging redneck cousin could set it up “ or words along those lines . Well I frankly find it a pain in the ass and the G system makes more sense .

[BigRedX]

PDF manuals are fine so long as they make use of all the additional functions that the PDF format allows, particularly hot links, so I can can click on the text that says "see page xx" and it will take me directly to the page in question. And all diagrams should be in vector format so that they are scaleable without loss of quality.

Unfortunately too many of them are just the print-ready PDFs complete with unnecessary printer's marks and bleed, which means that somewhere there should be actual printed versions of them.

[tacitus]

old man my arse you young pup

My year old SENIOR bus pass says different!!

Look , I’m trying to make you feel young and chipper again , before the horlicks weaves it’s insidious spell on you , waving around evidence that you’re almost ready to join the Soylent Green production team is not helping

You just mind what you say about Horlicks - the only product I use that works exactly as you want on the night. Of is that confirmation bias? No matter, I find the effort that should have gone into manuals seems to end up in prolix ad copy. Interchange the two at your peril …

[tacitus]

And as I hate hate hate working from yootoobs and probably aren’t alone in that feeling, I wonder how much modern gear is essentially reduced to paperweight status, merely serving to test our stamina?

In less recent times, I had to use lots of spreadsheets and word processors. It’s amazing how few commands you need to give the illusion of knowledge and competence, but it kind of negates the idea of saving time and effort while improving the quality of output. But I had a wheeze for that - when everybody was playing with dot matrix printers, I used a daisy-wheel to make my crap output prettier. I was fine until graphics came along!