Sony Offers a "Premium Sound" SD Card For a Premium Price

nateman1352 (971364) writes "Don't you just hate all that noise your memory cards make? No? Then you probably aren't going to want to buy Sony's new $160 memory cards, which the company brags offers "Premium Sound" that generates less electrical noise when reading data." As long as it works well with my hi-fi ethernet cable.

Comments

Hmm, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Of all the bullshit "high end" computer bits, this is one I might actually believe.

I wouldn't buy it, but electrical noise is actually a real problem for audio work. It's the reason a lot of high end computer sound gear is external and shielded. Higher end internal cards protect against it, but nothing protects you more than having the thing physically away from the electrically noisy environment that is your computer.

I can't think of any case I'd be using an SD card and would care about sound quality to that level, but that an SD card could generate noise and that it could interfere with some other audio source, I can see that.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

but electrical noise is actually a real problem for audio work.

Which should be dealt with at the analog end of the audio circuit.

SD cards are in the digital side. Analog and digital sides don't mix in any sane circuit design. But then this is for people that buy those Monster HDMI, Ethernet and other digital signaling cables.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[silverkniveshotmail.]

Do we even know that these are being marketed to end users? Are these not just shielded memory cards?

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony also thinks you will like their new $1200 Walkman.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Dutch Gun]

It seems relatively useless, as far as I can tell. You can buy a Zoom H4N (well regarded by professional audio guys for lightweight field recording) for $200 and just use a normal card. The electronics are all carefully shielded in professional professional gear. And of course, once the audio data is transformed into digital, there's no real issue. The data is digital at that point of course, and not subject to electronic noise.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[TheGratefulNet]

a lot of noise comes from oscillating windings in chokes and coils found in dc/dc converters. they often 'sing' under load, on cheap boards. ie, ALL boards for consumer grade gear are cheap boards, today.

one of my lcd displays has a really noisy dc/dc. you can hear the physical whine it makes across the room.

so, there's physical noise but also electrical noise. in some cases, I have been told that ssd's throw more has on the 5v dc psu bus than spinning drives do! I find that amazing (in a bad way).

noise on the dc bus is not something the user would normally care about; but coil whine is something that most people can hear.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Like I said, I can't actually see an application for this. Maybe if it was being used as a storage device near an analog in or out, but yeah, as you said, deal with it there.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The proposed mechanism is at least in agreement with the laws of physics(which is a nice change by audiophile standards); but I have to wonder what kind of terrifyingly awful crap people are playing music on if noise from the SD/SDIO bus is a large enough portion of the problem that even a 100% ideal perfectly silent microSD card would make much of a difference.

Higher end cards have pushed the spec a bit; but SD is not a particularly fast or high-energy bus. It's ubiquitous, cheap, low power, and fast enough, and thus wildly popular; but if somebody's SD interface is causing serious audio issues, the mere thought of what that designer's RAM bus looks like would probably cause the FCC to send out their crack team of death commandos.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Shielding all extraneous electrical noise is extremely challenging, I have a small computer I can't utilize the full 16 bit ADC built into it because there is too much noise induced by other parts of the circuit board. If the only thing causing interference was the hookup to a memory card I could try this memory card to alleviate the problem. Well worth it if it can help.

Is it a magical audiophile solution to "noise" in the ones and zeros? Nope.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[iluvcapra]

Zoom H4N (well regarded by professional audio guys for lightweight field recording)

I'm a "professional audio guy" and an H4n owner, and my regard for it is... adequate. It's mic self-noise is probably far in excess of any SD card noise. I still bring by Sound Devices running at 192k if I have to do anything serious (though I use SD cards for that, too).

Re:Hmm, maybe

[DrunkenTerror]

> have to wonder what kind of terrifyingly awful crap people are playing music on if noise from the SD/SDIO bus is a large enough portion of the problem

Dubstep, of course!

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Contrary to popular belief, microSD is FAR from being error-free. It's just that most operating systems are so ill-equipped to deal with the quirks of SD media, manufacturers can play fast & loose with reliability knowing that consumers are at least as likely to blame the host device for errors & corruption.

Case in point: try buying a 64-gig microSD card guaranteed to implement hardware wear-leveling and have small-block (4k) random-write throughput of 16 megabytes/second or better. If you can find any microSD card, by anyone, at any price, that makes a guarantee like that, I'll be seriously impressed (and probably buy a few). As it stands, microSD card quality is totally hit-or-miss. The manufacturers say almost nothing about hard capabilities (beyond the write class), because they want to be able to quietly cheapen/worsen the cards over time without having to give them a new SKU. That's why lots of "enthusiast-grade" cards sold by Amazon START OUT with 4- and 5-star reviews, but a year or two later, the recent reviews are all 1- and 2-star reviews with headlines like "total shit" and "different (worse) from the cards benchmarked by someone at XDA".

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

I can think of exactly two cases for this, but they're so specific they may as well not exist

a) You're recording analog audio in a very-very-VERY-very-very silent ambient environment... and you're a Foley artist. Among other things, the room would have to be sound-insulated, and literately be in the middle of nowhere, and the HVAC/ventilation turned off, and no pets/insects/pests.
b) You're playing back audio in a scientific environment that is super-sensative to electrical noise. We're talking about playing back ultrasonic sounds.

The top case requires specialized equipment, and if the sounds are meant for human ears, than any introduced electrical noise, even at 48bit/192khz can be filtered out. The bottom case is more of fringe situation for someone communicating with mice or insects.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[bugnuts]

I've heard lots of digital noise when mixing production sound, but it's usually from cellphones and HID lamps. On one production, I had to have everyone double check their phones were off, checked all the wiring, XLR cables, etc, and found the problem was the recorder was noisy out of spec. There's a small possibility it was actually a noisy connection on the card, although I've never heard of a noisy card itself.

For those that have never done production sound, the equipment can absolutely produce noise, and you need to limit it as best as possible. Usually, the noise floor of the preamps, room, and poor mic placement will trump any beeping you might get from pro electronics, but I do not put the possibility of it in the Monster Cable category of bullshit. I believe it *could* happen, but is probably extremely rare and only in controlled ADC rooms.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[mirix]

There's no switching (or otherwise) power supply in a SD card though. Not much of anything other than flash and a controller.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[viperidaenz]

You should probably sit back down in your armchair.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[viperidaenz]

In regard to SSD's, they usually have a capacitor based charge pump inside them to boost the voltage high enough to erase the flash.

Same with SD cards... Nice and noisy on the power supply line.
Not to mention the slew rate on the ground referenced single ended data lines of an SD card, which run up to 208MHz.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[viperidaenz]

SD is not a particularly fast or high-energy bus

It is now. Most high speed signals these days are impedance match differential pairs.
SD is single ended and can run up to 208MHz these days. How much current do you need to charge a 30pf pin to 1.3V in less than 200ns Not an insignificant amount I imagine.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no, no... a billion times no. Yes, electrical noise is a real problem, but all you care about with an SD card is getting the right set of 1's and 0's off the card, in the right order. If you're getting "electrical noise" through an SD card, it means it's acting like an antenna and dumping random EMR into your system-- Which is why most SD card slots are wrapped in METAL.

A 0.001 or a .9998 still comes out to a 0 or a 1. Period. Everything else is handled on the transition from 1's and 0's to actual analog outputs, which should not involve the SD card in any way.

Show me the oscilloscope trace of the "noisy" SD card, and the "clean" SD card on the same hardware, and explain how one of them is noisier than the other, and you might start convincing me. ... and this from someone who did a high school science fair project involving metal cassette tapes, an oscilloscope and a frequency generator.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[umdesch4]

I know this to be true. I have a Fiio X3, and I notice that for a couple of the particularly cheap micro-SD cards I put in it, I can hear some weird noise that sounds a little like cell phone interference when I'm playing files off them. Of course, I have to have it cranked, and only notice it during the extremely quiet parts sections of my music. So there is something to this, as I can imagine it's hard to properly shield the output of the DAC properly on small hardware like this. Still, I'm not about to make a case for spending a lot of extra money, since most of my decent (ie. Sandisk and Kingston) micro-SD cards are fine.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

How much current do you need to charge a 30pf pin to 1.3V in less than 200ns Not an insignificant amount I imagine.

~0.2 mA

Re:Hmm, maybe

[viperidaenz]

4k random write on any flash based storage device with wear leveling is hard to guarantee. You're restricted by the amount of RAM on the device (of which, Micro SD cards have very little, they're almost entirely flash memory with no room for much else) the erase block size and erase speed.

If you end up writing to a block with data already in it, the entire erase block that contains it must be copied, erased and written back. If you're lucky to have free blocks, the erase can be avoided and the data written to an already erased block.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

what about cards that are/were highly regarded such as SanDisk?

Re:Hmm, maybe

[bloodhawk]

It is a digital storage device. you are reading Zero's and One's, there is no electrical "noise", either it is successfully reading the contents or it is erroring, if you have a memory card producing errors when reading or writing then you should be replacing it. this is not some analog signal where noise is affecting what is written or read.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Anrego]

I don't think they are claiming noise in the stored data (although from the articles they don't really claim anything), so much as noise that would effect a near by audio input or output. That is, say, you've got some kind of device that records an analog signals (from say a mic) to an SD card, and the act of writing to that SD card is generating noise which is then making it's way into your analog input.

I still say bullshit. This is right up there with specialty wooden volume knobs in the "maybe with scientific equipment you can see an effect, but practically speaking forget it" category, but at least we're not in Monster "high end digital cable" territory.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[NixieBunny]

The charge pump is on-chip in all modern flash chips. There's nothing that Sony could do to make their memory card better than any generic SD card in terms of sound performance, other than printing the words "for Premium Sound" on the front and charging more for it.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Dutch Gun]

Yeah, that's why I mentioned "lightweight" field recordings, meaning situations when you can't or didn't bring more expensive gear. I don't think any pro would use just that if they could lug in their high-end equipment - especially not the built-in microphones. I was just pointing out that even a $200 device (let alone a several thousand dollar Sound Devices field recorder) doesn't really seem to have problems with standard SD card noise, which it seems coincides with your experience as well.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[NixieBunny]

A 200 MHz signal isn't detectable in the audio realm unless it has a large non-random low-frequency component.
I would hope that Sony knows how to shield the digital circuitry on their MP3 player. I'm still not convinced that you'd be able to do anything about audio noise level by redesigning the micro SD card. The only source of audio noise would be slow things such as page read-related current pulses, and there's not enough real estate on a micro SD board to provide a low frequency filter.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[nitehawk214]

Look at the picture it of it. It has "For Premium Sound" printed right on it. (in gold, so you know it is premium)

If that isn't bait for monster cables purchasers, I don't know what is.

Hell, the thing might actually work as advertised and is shielded against electronic noise. But they know damn well that would do nothing for digital data.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[PopeRatzo]

But then this is for people that buy those Monster HDMI, Ethernet and other digital signaling cables.

Don't you dare make fun of my $120 cable elevators.

http://www.musicdirect.com/p-9...

Re:Hmm, maybe

[bloodhawk]

Ok fair enough, But If you have a need for such clarity from audio input and outputs where other sources of noise aren't more significant then you would not be using a crappy device that suffers from such interference in the first place. It is like designing a set of racing tires for use on a 1960's junker.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be younger than me or work at a desk. I've worked in heavy industry (paper mills, ship building, etc.) for ~40 yrs. I can hardly hear myself yell "GET OFF MY FUCKING LAWN".

Re:Hmm, maybe

[wierd_w]

Devil's advocate (pulled squarely out of my ass):

This may prove useful where you are using PWM bitbanged IO on the SDCard. A card with better internal noise reduction on the data leads could possibly be more reliable in such a setup, with faster bitbang IO rates.

Sony may be on to something there, but marketing it wrong.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[floodo1]

When you have a noise "digital side" in close physical proximity to the analog "side", perhaps in a mobile device, then the "analog and digital sides" definitely do mix. It's entirely possible that these cards make an audible difference in various playback devices ... doesn't seem too likely but the effect that Sony is trying to reduce is similar to how placing a cell phone next to some playback devices induces audible differences. Plus, the best way to deal with noise is to prevent it in the first place!, not attempt to filter it out (I assume that's what you mean by "dealt with") "at the analog end of the audio circuit."

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been seriously thinking of selling my Tascam DP-03SD "PortaStudio" and buying a Zoom H6. I like the option of having a shotgun mic, although I doubt I'd use anything other than the X-Y, you can also install extra XLR jacks but I think 4 is already enough for a portable recorder. I take that back, 6 tracks might be nice, put 2-3 mics on the drum kit, and the rest for guitar, bass and vocals. But honestly, it's just easier to sound test to mix the drums down to one track and not fuss about it.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

my harddrive is digital, but when the head moves some of my old amplifiers pick up weird little chirps. Even when they aren't plugged into my PC. I had to move stuff around and muck with it for quite some time to minimize it, I gave up trying to use that gear with my DAW.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[thegarbz]

There's nothing that Sony could do to make their memory card better than any generic SD card in terms of sound performance, other than printing the words "for Premium Sound" on the front and charging more for it.

You mean Sony one of the few companies who are actually manufacturing their own semiconductors are unable to change the design of their own chips? That's an interesting speculation.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[thegarbz]

While I don't buy into the summary, I would caution against ever making an assumption that something isn't detectable due to its frequency.

There have been many MANY cases where inter-modulation of various signals magically puts things within the audible range. If there's a second clock source somewhere, or there's an external frequency near the fundamental then you most definitely can suddenly generate signals within the audible range.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're going to invest a few million into designing a new SD card and the mask set for it... Yeah right.... My bet is that they might have modified the controller software to group erase operations and added a ferrite bead and maybe some extra capacitor or two in the package.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Suppose an application reads some data every 10 ms. That shows up as 100 Hz noise, despite the actual frequency being 100+ MHz. These types of situations are very common.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[qpqp]

Yeah, also check that the wifi is off... No shit.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[iluvcapra]

Sorry, I read "lightweight" literally. The H4n is very mass-efficient; on the other hand all the kewl kids now shop for rigs like an Olympus LS-100, mainly because the H4n only uses AAs and the Olympus recorders just have much better battery life.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Cederic]

If you've been working for 40 years then it's generally a safe assumption that any random other person is probably younger than you, especially online.

Rather than referencing your lawn though you should be highlighting that "We solved that one 30 years ago, why are you reinventing the wheel?"

Re:Hmm, maybe

[WillKemp]

It's so i can put my music on it and get better sound quality when i play it on my car stereo.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

"A 200 MHz signal isn't detectable in the audio realm unless it has a large non-random low-frequency component. "

Memory transfers tend to have these.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[itzly]

Flash memory is a specialized business. It would take Sony huge investments to become a player in that field, even if they already have their own manufacturing capabilities.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[drinkypoo]

a lot of noise comes from oscillating windings in chokes and coils found in dc/dc converters. they often 'sing' under load, on cheap boards.

Which is to say, boards on which the chokes and coils are not potted in epoxy. Far too many of these devices are now "naked" and unpotted. It was the potting that kept them from vibrating.

I think I may have to go on a quest to pot the coils in my UPSes, they are cheap tripplites and they hum like mad bastards.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[UnknownSoldier]

> playing music on if noise

You mean there is a difference with dubstep? :-) /me ducks

--
"One man's noise is another man's music (Yoshimura motorcycle muffler, Heavy Metal, Opera, etc.)
"One man's relaxation is another man's boredom (Fishing, etc.)

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony has been a player in the flash memory business sense 1998. They made the proprietary memory stick format.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Stick

Re:Hmm, maybe

[omnichad]

The primary shielding should be on the DAC - why filter only one source?. But shielding isn't all - it introduces noise to the DC current as well. Your DAC and amplifier both run on the same DC circuit and need some extra power conditioning (even in small devices) to make sure you get a clean signal.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[omnichad]

If you're getting "electrical noise" through an SD card, it means it's acting like an antenna and dumping random EMR into your system-- Which is why most SD card slots are wrapped in METAL.

Wrap it in metal all you want, but if the same DC current supply is also feeding the DAC and the amplifier then shielding isn't your only concern. I'm not saying that these cards are worth paying for, but noise can come from anywhere.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[ArcadeMan]

"We solved that one 30 years ago, why are you reinventing the wheel?"

"Because Apple has a trademark on squares with rounded corners?" /duck

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Half-pint HAL]

But it might have reduce interference on devices where the signal lines to the speaker and/or earphone/mic sockets are next to the SD slot. This is the case in most laptops, and in ultracompacts you can sometimes get signal noise on the analogue circuits from the digital ones. USB bus and SD slot are key culprits. Of course, this is a bigger problem in cheap computers, and people who buy cheap computers aren't likely to spend $160 on an SD card.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Half-pint HAL]

Actually, the original H4 suffered audible blips when used with certain SD cards, when powered from the bundled adaptor. Something to do with slightly high (but not beyond sd spec) power draw from the card, and an underspecced (or missing) AC-blocking capacitor on the H4 unit, IIRC.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[thegarbz]

You must have short term memory loss. Sony WAS a player in the field. Not only did they manufacture memory chips but they manufactured a whole competing standard to the SD, XD, and CF cards. The only thing that killed it was their hugely proprietary nature.

Also flash memory is specialised only that you need a foundry and some patents. There's nothing magical about flash memory that prevents anyone with a chip fab from producing it, especially a company with history, their own manufacturing capabilities, and their own expertise as a semiconductor designer and manufacturer.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[nitehawk214]

Actually, my car has a short in it that shows up when I have the phone plugged into charge while the headphone socket is connected to the stereo. The problem is with the analog section of the connection. No amount of shielding the phone's memory is going to help with that. It manifests as static on the speakers. Unplugging the phone charger makes it go away.

Having some higher end 12vUSB adapter would probably fix this. Noise on the digital side is an either-or situation. Either you can read the digital signal or not.

Still, this technology might help to protect data reading and writing in high-noise situations. I can see this being popular with cameras and data recording devices.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[TwoEyedJack]

The only companies making competitive flash these days are Samsung, Micron/Intel, SK Hynix, and Toshiba/Sandisk.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Coren22]

If the analog side of a device is not electrically shielded, then you are doing it wrong. Stop buying cheap garbage.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[cerberusti]

The thing is that audio is generally not entirely digital.

I have had computers where moving the mouse produced a specific sound through the headphones. Most are better these days, but shielding the analog components and wires, and generally reducing noise components make can have an impact.

If you are amplifying it this will also amplify your noise, which is an easy way to make it noticeable.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[balbus000]

That site... it's hurting my brain. I don't know whether to laugh, or cry, or huddle in a corner and start sucking my thumb. Carbon HDMI cable

There are significant, audible differences between HDMI cables. We're not sure how this is possible, since HDMI is purported to be a purely digital interface, however, the sonic differences are repeatable and consistent from system to system. A better HDMI cable makes a better digital audio cable, period. This is as true for music as it is for movies.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Dutch Gun]

I took a quick peek at the specs on the LS-100, and yeah, it looks nice (especially the improved battery life). Well, I've been out of the loop for a couple of years. I'm not surprised if things have moved on. The H4N has been around a while, after all.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[PopeRatzo]

Carbon HDMI cable

A steal at $144.75.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[solidraven]

Yes, because you can totally hear that outside of audio range noise that comes with rapid digital communications.And don't start with "but sharp transitions", learn how to use a spectrum analyser and Fourier analyser. The later will most likely be useless since it won't go that high. And most switch-mode power supplies used in audio applications operate at fairly high frequencies these days. (Way outside of the audible range, think 50 - 900 kHz.) Get a damned book and learn something about EMI/EMC before you go and spread around audiophile crap.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[solidraven]

Ever realized most of these > 12 bit ADCs actually have 2 or more bits that are always noise? Read the datasheet.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[solidraven]

We should totally crash that market, I'm going to make a super conducting cable that needs a tank of liquid nitrogen, then I'm also going to sell a tank with better audio characteristics that are achieved by lining the outside with a shiny coating and putting a "Premium Sound" label on it.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[iluvcapra]

It's really hard to build a piece of portable equipment that properly grounds all noise sources, mainly because there's no earth connection and shields have to just dump to the battery, and but have to be really carefully filtered from the audio and data grounds before they all come back together.

Don't you mean AC-blocking choke or inductor? Caps block DC.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[lsatenstein]

but electrical noise is actually a real problem for audio work.

Which should be dealt with at the analog end of the audio circuit.

SD cards are in the digital side. Analog and digital sides don't mix in any sane circuit design. But then this is for people that buy those Monster HDMI, Ethernet and other digital signaling cables.

My bits in bytes stored in my superior bytes will have sharper corners than your SSD is what I think they will provide. That is a way to say our memory has faster rise times and fall times. And for that feature, it requires special low capacity circuitry. It matters not about the rise/fall edge if all the circuitry samples in the centre between clock transitions. But with very fast rise /fall times comes extreme sensitivity to static noise. Where the current memory takes 5 to 10 nanoseconds to change state, noise would have to be a pulse at least 2 to 3 nanoseconds wide to perhaps provide a false reading. But with performance memory, that same 2 nanosecond noise can completely change the state of the sampled bit because of the time required for a rise/fall of signal.

And for those square corners, you have to pay a premium. So just suck that up!

Re:Hmm, maybe

[X0563511]

SD cards are commonly used in handheld recorders, in very close proximity to some sensitive condenser microphones.

Maybe I'm lucky and mine is just quiet - I don't hear any noise even when I record at 96khz and play at 11khz... but I can certainly see this having an affect.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[stoatwblr]

Sony don't make memory devices - ram or flash.

Even when they had their own form factors, they didn't make the internals.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[stoatwblr]

The downside of potting things is that they get hotter. I've seen one design where potting caused a power transister to get hot enough to melt its solder joints - and as the potting shrank with age it eventually pulled the thing off the board.

The kicker is that the design in question is the electronic controller at the core of the ICE/NAV system of a Nissan Primera and Nissan's solution is to charge $2000 to fix it - by swapping out the module for one with exactly the same design fault.

After word got around what the problem is, some 3rd party outfits started offering to do the repair for about $100 (it's about 90 mins work to disassemble/fix/reassemble) and dealers started offering to charge $500 for repairs - by sending them to the 3rd party outfits.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[gzuckier]

While I don't buy into the summary, I would caution against ever making an assumption that something isn't detectable due to its frequency.

There have been many MANY cases where inter-modulation of various signals magically puts things within the audible range. If there's a second clock source somewhere, or there's an external frequency near the fundamental then you most definitely can suddenly generate signals within the audible range.

You betcha. Any kind of nonlinearity, or a resonance that could get excited, ends up acting in the audible realm; that's why the > 22 khz spurious mage is actively filtered out of CD player outputs instead of just assuming that even if the equipment won't reproduce it, and even if it could you wouldn't hear it.

Re:Hmm, maybe

[Half-pint HAL]

Diode. I meant diode.

I'll take 10!

[jtownatpunk.net]

And a Monster Cable USB cable. Not really. But the VGA card in my 286 used to make noise when it was scrolling a block of text.

Re:I'll take 10!

[Anonymous Coward]

my 286 used to make noise when it was scrolling a block of text.

That's so schway, it's actually cyberpunk.

Re:I'll take 10!

[Anrego]

That's not even limited to ancient gear. My old PC at work did that, and it had a dual core processor so it wasn't _that_ old. It was kind of a weird long drawn out high pitched "dragging" sound.. very annoying.

Re:I'll take 10!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Some newer PCs actually made things worse: with the adoption of better power-saving features, it became quite common for the CPU frequency to move up and down depending on whether it was idling or you were throwing something at it at the time, rather than always running at the same frequency.

I had one 'delightful' system where the lousy onboard sound chip was apparently using the CPU clock as a timebase, despite the system being new enough that dynamic clock speed adjustment had been routine for several years. Until the vendor eventually issued a BIOS update that allowed us to turn off clock speed adjustment, we had to rig a low-priority Prime95 process to keep the CPU from idling into a lower speed state if we wanted the playback speed and pitch to be correct. And I though that using the CPU as a timebase died out about the same time as the 'turbo' button...

Re:I'll take 10!

[Neil Boekend]

You should have demanded your money back. You let the bastards get away with it and not only did they not fix it, they cripled the CPU freq scaling as a "fix".

Re:I'll take 10!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I would have liked to; but(thankfully) I wasn't on the procurement side in the case of that particular job(given the nightmare that was our PO system, I am most grateful). Ultimately pragmatism won out over principle and(for the small subset of affected users) we got some $5 c-media USB sound cards, which proceeded to work perfectly regardless of CPU frequency.

It was one of those situations where the villains skated free; but the number of hours it would have taken on the phone, fighting it out between the vendor of the software that most notably exposed the problem, the PC OEM, the maker of the onboard sound device, and possibly Microsoft, just would have been hell. Not the desired outcome; but the slog to get something better probably would have cost more than entire new systems, never mind new soundcards.

For me, it was mostly a wake-up call about how bloody awful some peripherals and peripheral drivers still are, and how long assumptions that were recognized as dangerous and hacky back when 8MHz was a respectable CPU clock can stick around. Not a pleasant learning experience; but not all are. Somewhat amusing troubleshooting, though. You don't usually expect 100% CPU load to make audio playback better.

Re:I'll take 10!

[hairyfeet]

Sigma Sound? Those chips are pretty notorious among repair guys for just how truly shitty integrated could be, having less features than a bottom of the line AC '97. BTW you think that was dumbshit? With Windows Vista you had to go in and disable any and all CPU power saving like Speedstep and Cool & Quiet because the second the CPU would start parking cores and dropping frequencies? Vista would start scheduling jobs for those chips!

As for TFA? Its snake oil, pure and simple. A 1 is a 1, a 0 is a 0,and data is data.

Re:I'll take 10!

[Anonymous Coward]

Great story! +1 Interesting

Re:I'll take 10!

[Half-pint HAL]

I had a laptop at work that whined if you used the scroll wheel on the mouse. Pentium2 era.

Re:I'll take 10!

[gzuckier]

digital stuff generates so much switching noise, that can get picked up on the analog side and have bad effects. A trick from the earliest days of hotrodding cd players was just to move the audio parts out from the whole digital end, with their own power supply.

Well, that depends

[ShaunC]

I see they have gold colored print, that has to boost the sound quality by about 10 bucks. But is Monster selling titanium-plated connectors for them yet? Have any advertisers signed up to preload audio advertisements on the cards? This doesn't seem ready for prime time. Sony, give me a call just as soon as you're ready to start charging me a monthly fee!

Re:Well, that depends

[nytes]

But is Monster selling titanium-plated connectors for them yet?

No, but you might not need them.

Sony is including a green felt marker to paint he edge of your SD card for only $20 extra!

I have dark confession

[sinij]

I have dark confession, I own gold-plated HDMI cable. Now before you judge me...

... you judged me anyways! But I got it on Going Out of Business Sale! For 5$ out of a bin! I had to! You too would buy one for $5. They sell them for hundreds to fools!

Re:I have dark confession

[Shados]

Monoprice hdmi cables are also gold plated and are 3-5 bucks on a normal day anyway.

Re:I have dark confession

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Gold is a bit overblown in advertising; but (aside from its real physical scarcity, and the unfortunate competition from finance assholes who want to carefully dig it up, refine it, and then have it sit in vaults), it is a genuinely nice ingredient for electrical applications. Adequate thermal and electrical conductivity, immune to most common causes of corrosion, not too difficult to electroplate, fairly easy to tailor from 'shockingly malleable and ductile' to 'adequately hard' just by adding or withholding a few % copper... Good stuff.

Re:I have dark confession

[hcs_$reboot]

They sell them for hundreds to fools!

And they sell $5 cables to fools who really think it's gold.

Re:I have dark confession

[msauve]

I got a bunch of Monster video and audio cables, with really nice machined, gold plated RCA ends. They're great, mostly because they were also free out of a dumpster in back of a Best Buy. (I was there looking for a large piece of cardboard for a project)

Re:I have dark confession

[viperidaenz]

If the connectors aren't gold plated, you risk corrosion damaging them.

Re:I have dark confession

[lgw]

I have a lot of audio patch cords that clearly come from the same factory as the Monster cables, just with a "DaytonAudio" label instead, that sold for $3-5. It's not like they bad cables or anything. I can't match your price though.

Re:I have dark confession

[thegarbz]

So do I. There's reasons to go for gold plating. None of them have to do with superior picture but the gold plating is corrosion resistant.

The only time you don't find gold plating a prevailing option in equipment is on self wiping connections. The type which scrape the surface during the plug / unplug cycle. In those cases you'll often find some kind of cheap silver coating, where silver tarnish is still more conductive than many forms of tin/copper corrosion.

Re:I have dark confession

[thegarbz]

It is real gold. But gold has a lot of interesting properties such as:

- Even low grade gold such as 8-10k is very corrosion resistant. You don't find 24k gold in electronics.
- Gold can be melted down and coated in very VERY thin coats. Typical electronic connectors have a coating around 1 micron thick.

Estimates for the amount of real gold in terms of pure gold cost in a typical cellphone range from $0.30 - $1. With gold coatings on most connectors, and even the non-silkscreened area of the circuit board. There's around $0.15 - $0.4 worth of pure gold on a typical gold plated HDMI cable depending on the quality of the coating.

The Chinese are experts at giving themselves cancer in the name of mining this gold out of old electronics with entire towns devoted to the industry of gold recovery from "recycled" (reads dumped) electronics.

Re:I have dark confession

[phantomfive]

Gold plated connectors are really handy in humid environments because gold doesn't corrode.

Re:I have dark confession

[tlhIngan]

I have a lot of audio patch cords that clearly come from the same factory as the Monster cables, just with a "DaytonAudio" label instead, that sold for $3-5. It's not like they bad cables or anything. I can't match your price though.

I've bought a bunch of Monster cables for around that price, only because that was all they had on sale. Basically a store that bought up a bunch of overstock and sold it at huge discounts in original sealed Monster packaging.

They are nice cables since they don't snag nor have insulation that binds up so you are pulling one out through a rats nest, they slide easily.

Of course, I won't pay $100 for them, but at $5-10 each, why not.

Re:I have dark confession

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's actually pretty hard to fake gold(only Uranium and Tungsten have the right density; but are wrong on everything else, the brasses and bronzes that tepidly approach 'gold' in color don't have the density or chemical properties); but it is much, much, less difficult to deposit it in very, very, thin layers.

Re:I have dark confession

[stealth_finger]

I got a bunch of Monster video and audio cables, with really nice machined, gold plated RCA ends. They're great, mostly because they were also free out of a dumpster in back of a Best Buy. (I was there looking for a large piece of cardboard for a project)

Niiiice

Re:I have dark confession

[drinkypoo]

I can do better than that, I own two gold-plated MONSTER DVI CABLES. But wait, I got them at the grocery outlet for $5/each. And they have neato braided jacketing that doesn't hang up on other cables.

Anyway, gold-plated connectors do seem to corrode less, and in real-world home environments there's often quite a bit of moisture. I'll take what protection I can get.

Re:I have dark confession

[Half-pint HAL]

On the other hand, a cable is a consumable, whereas the sockets and internals of your TV/monitor and PC aren't. It doesn't make sense to risk sacrificial corrosion of any and every active part of the system in order to protect the component that is easiest to replace and also most likely to get chewed by the dog.

Re:I have dark confession

[Half-pint HAL]

But if the other half of the connection (eg the socket on your laptop) isn't gold, use of gold-plating in the cable plug is going to hasten corrosion. (Through sacrificial protection.)

Re:I have dark confession

[phantomfive]

Really? Why?

Re:I have dark confession

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, plating another metal with it doesn't offer any kind of advantage when it comes to conductivity. In fact, it gets worse, so "gold plated for better signal transmission" is complete bullshit. If anything, it's to prevent corrosion, as you mentioned.

Re:I have dark confession

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Indeed. It's an adequate enough conductor that plating something with gold won't ruin its conductivity(at least not as badly as a layer of tarnish/oxidation will), and it's good enough to use for wirebonding in chip packaging; but it's merely adequate. Corrosion resistance and extreme ductility are the really neat tricks.

Re:I have dark confession

[Half-pint HAL]

It's about the "reactivity series" of metals. When different metals are in contact, the more active metal gives up electrons to the less active one, hastening corrosion of the more active metal and slowing corrosion of the less active metal.

Re:I have dark confession

[gzuckier]

indeed; in what we use for atmosphere over here, phono connectors and the like become low grade semiconductors after a year. phono connectors are my candidate for the optimally worst connector, anyway. but the gold plating needs to be sufficiently thick as to make a difference other than visually. heck, just solder the damn cables to the equipment, make more difference than any high performance connectors, and how often do you connect and disconnect them anyway?

Re:I have dark confession

[KozmoStevnNaut]

I can beat that.

I own a gold-plated TOSLINK cable.

Noise?

[hcs_$reboot]

I use mainly Crucial stuff and the sound is not that bad. Doing a "find / ..." produces some low dB noise, but it's nothing compared to the noise coming from the good old mechanical hard disks.

5x price?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Sony isn’t even sure there are any customers out there who would actually be interested in the 64 gigabyte SR-64HXA micro SDXC memory card, which will be sold for about $160 in Japan starting next month, reports the Wall Street Journal.

That’s about five times the price of your average SD card, and with the same amount of storage.

I don't buy that, a google search for 64gb cards shows they are still in the $70-80 range. So twice the price, not five times. But there is still no information about what the extra price gets you, and there are no specs in the article about data transfer rates either (nice "skeptical" cat picture though). I've seen several manufacturers offer "archival quality" MicroSDs for a premium price, but they are claimed to be a little better armored and you can supposedly run them through an airport x-ray machine without toasting the data. Somehow I suspect Sony's are snake oil.

Less Noise In Images Too

[Anonymous Coward]

This will be great for photographers too, use it in digital cameras for clearer pictures with less "noise" when you zoom in on JPEGs.

Not.

Re:Less Noise In Images Too

[X0563511]

Nope, because the image data is already pulled from the CCD and has undergone some minimal processing before writes to the SD card start to happen, so I don't expect RFI from the SD card circuits to matter.

10x

[justthinkit]

$15.99

Re:10x

[Enry]

A Class 4 full size SD card. Sounds exactly the same.

Don't get me wrong: the SR-64HXA is overpriced, but don't think that you can get a similar card for $16.

Re:10x

[viperidaenz]

Find a Class 10 card if you want to make a fair comparison, not Class 4

Re:10x

[Anonymous Coward]

Find a Class 10 card if you want to make a fair comparison, not Class 4

Do they store bits differently?

Re: 10x

[Anonymous Coward]

They have different prices.

Re:10x

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Assuming that they aren't simply lying(sometimes a safe assumption...sometimes not so much) "Class 2", "Class 4", "Class 6", and "Class 10" are supposed to be guarantees of 2, 4, 6, and 10 MB/s minimum write speed, respectively, while UHS1 is supposed to be 10MB/s with support for UHS bus operation, and U3 is supposed to be 30MB/s with support for UHS-II bus operation.

How they store bits, internally, is not specified; but minimum write speed is obviously fairly important to people shooting video or enough large still images, quickly enough, that dumping them to flash can be a bottleneck. Unfortunately, despite the increasingly common case of SD/MMC-bus connected devices being used in situations where read performance matters as well(eg. storing programs in cellphones, being rPi root filesystems) standards for testing and labeling read speed, random I/O performance, and similar SSD-enthusiast stats are more or less nonexistent.

As bulk storage for music files, a Class 4 is likely to do just fine( even golden-ears FLAC is what, 5-6 megabytes/minute?); but unless the stickers are pure lies, a Class 10 is likely to be a rather nicer card.

Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

All flash memory is equally good for storing music, since it is, by design, immune to rotational velocidensity.

Snake oil

[Anonymous Coward]

I am an actual analog circuit designer, so here is my take:

First of all, let me start by saying I'm sure, just like everyone else, that these devices have no practical effect on the audio produced by pretty much any practical system. That said, people seem to be confused about the nature of noise in a system.

As the story correctly notes, digital systems are inherently noise resistant, and often include error correction. There is no SD card or cable in the world that will help improve digital transmission if all the data is already being successfully transmitted. However, analog systems are susceptible to noise. In fact, a significant amount of analog design is dedicated to dealing with noise. In addition to random noise, which is introduced by thermal movement or other random processes in the devices, analog signals are also susceptible to interference, or other nearby signals which can corrupt the analog signal. Nearby electromagnetic fields can couple to analog traces on the board, degrading performance. A significant effort goes into carefully routing and shielding analog traces, as well as moving sources of interference further away.

High speed digital systems are a large source of interference. The fact that digital systems involve several wires switching at "full swing" at high frequency means that it produces a comparatively large electromagnetic field in the immediate vicinity. Again, a significant effort goes into keeping digital and analog components apart from each other in high quality audio systems. If your analog trace goes next to a memory running at hundreds of MHz, it will effectively increase the noise floor of your audio.

It is conceivably possible that Sony actually did design an SD card which generates less electromagnetic interference (EMI). This could conceivably lessen the amount of interference coupled into an audio signal somewhere. That said... it's not going to make any difference in reality. If the SD card noise was having a practical effect on your audio then the whole systems was crap to begin with. So, as I think everyone in this thread can agree, this is snake oil.

Re:Snake oil

[viperidaenz]

You're an analog designer.
Imagine how much EMI comes from 5 single ended lines switching at 1.8V at 208MHz.

Re:Snake oil

[Anonymous Coward]

Not enough that anyone would ever notice outside of specialized applications.

Re:Snake oil

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are wrong in the sense that, all matter as energy travels through it creates noise, picks up noise, and all that. Each component as energy travels through and as energy is picked up is going to suffer from it, and any component introduced in the loop is going to be part of the problem.

When it comes to purity and physics, noise is a real problem even for digital systems (over distances a digital signal becomes corrupt and incommunicatable, error rates increase, jitters introduced, impacted latency, equipment function, signals, voltages, and more), but how much does it really matter?

Most of these problems cannot truly be fixed in some type of hardware design, the best way to handle them is simple elimination of the problems and prevention by using high quality components that allow energy and matter to travel efficiently and while being less impacted by interference. This means every component in the loop of a device must be built to higher standards.

when audio to begin with is so low quality, even the HD stuff at 24 bit/192kHz, to me I find the investment doesn't always lead to payout, but I will say all investment is worth it and does lead to improvement even if its only a small improvement.

Also note the lack of 24/192 sources anyway.

Missing from sound recordings is the demensions, the multiple directions of travel, the paths and reflections, the depth, and multi point 3D nature. Sound today is recorded from a fixed point and stored in fixed point format typically in 'channels' and its reproduced from a single point which strips out original detail and info. I calculated once that, it would take gigabytes per second to accurately store an audio signal or a possibly a huge chuck of physical space to store perfectly in order to have zero loss of info, something they took into account when compromises were made to create existing technologies (they made many trade offs, to make digital and analog audio work, lowering bandwidth and making the technology practical, hense we end up with pretty low quality and low complex stuff).

ObamasWeapon.com

Re:Snake oil

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a design engineer specialising in analogue.
I have an nice little MP3 player.
If I add or change MP3 (or FLAC or whatever) on the uSD card it spends 20 seconds after booting indexing the updated card.
I CAN HEAR IT. IT IS IRRITATING.
While I haven't investigated it I could easily believe that the digital hash type noise, which is distinctive, is coming from the bursts of power drawn by the card.
On another note, I have used large capacity SD cards in a data logger for electromagnetic signals.
A major problem was the current, drawn in bursts, by the SD cards as data was being written to them.

So, while a don't believe a word of the 'monster cable' type of snake oil, reducing the EMI and bursty nature of the power consumption might, in some cases, deliver a tangible benefit,

O

Re:Snake oil

[AmiMoJo]

Let's say you have a 2V p-p signal, pretty common "line level" audio. You have a bog standard 16 bit DAC generating that signal. 1 LSB causes a change of around 30uV. In a typical consumer audio system if you have less than 30mV of noise you are doing pretty well.

Sony are selling a player capable of 24 bit audio playback, which is known as HD audio. It's becoming popular in Japan. Now 1 LSB is only about 120nV. Nanovolts.

You are reading music from an SD card. The SD card has a digital interface, with digital lines switching at a few megahertz at least. Even worse cheap cards will apply a switching load to the power supply, and don't have much in the way of capacitance or inductance to smooth it out.

So, there is definitely a real argument that the SD card itself could be improved to reduce these problems. You can argue over how worth while it is from an SQ point of view, but unlikely real snake oil there is a measurable effect here.

Re:Snake oil

[Neil Boekend]

I see 3 possible sources for your problem:
a. the MP3 player is badly designed. There should be sufficient capacitance to smooth the power level out to within a few percent of standard even at full read or write. Alternatively the audio traces could be routed too close to the data lines or the designer for the DAC may have had a bad day.
This means that the MP3 player was cheap enough that the designers weren't allowed the time to test their design properly.
b. Your ears are magnificent. That would cause you to hear sounds that the designers didn't feel were relevant.
c. Nocebo effect. You feel there might be a sound so there is a sound. These sounds can be really annoying.

Of course it could be something else that I have missed but these are the parts I would test.

I'd love to hook your MP3 player's audio out to an oscilloscope and see what it could be.

Re:Snake oil

[Anonymous Coward]

If the card were a significant source of noise - wouldn't you just move the reader further away from whatever it's interfering with? Or wrap it in some shielding?

Re:Snake oil

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm willing to bet its 100% puffery. (And lets be frank. You're lucky if you end up with just 100% puffery in the audio electronics market. We've been down this rabbit hole before. You've seen 1000 dollar cables that carry claims that sound like something out of a homeopathy book.)

Maybe. Maaaaybe they did some extra QC and paid someone to test/handpick the best binned parts.

This would actually be nice, really. Not worth the margin they are charging but the flash market is so saturated and has such razor thin margins that QC is sketchy even on major name brands. Supply chains are so fluid that devices sold under the same part numbers can often be vastly different internally, and can have reliability and performance characteristics that are very different. Grey market/counterfeit supply is rife, and can creep in to your supply chain at any point, even with supposedly respectable brands bought from supposedly authorized resellers.

And when I mean razor thin margins I mean it. SD card flash dies are fabricated with in-circuit testing so they can be tested right on the line. The time it would take to move the devices off the line in to a separate testing line, apparently, is much more expensive.

I'd pay an extra 10-20% to get flash media that is simply, reliably 'known good'. And, you know, tested once more before it's packaged. Maybe even marked with serials so each part can be traced back to origin.

Re:Snake oil

[sjames]

I'll bet that if you take the extra cost of just one of those platinum coated SD cards and apply it to the cost of the player, you can get rid of the noise problems.

Re:Snake oil

[pz]

As (another) analog designer who happens to be in the middle of designing a mixed-signal board, I can assure you that the right answer depends on how sensitive your analog circuitry is, and it could very well be that the answer is, "enough to drive you crazy trying to eliminate the interference."

Proper shielding of analog circuitry from digital interference, when the two are in close proximity, is really very, very hard. That's why you see all of the high-end audio cards have either (a) full faraday cages (plus careful PCB layout technique), or (b) are external to the computer case, or (c) both.

Five unshielded single-ended lines switching 1.8V at 208MHz that might not be properly terminated? Sounds like a powerful AM transmitter to me if my uV to mV level analog traces are anywhere near them.

Re:Snake oil

[Anonymous Coward]

I was thinking something along those lines. I've had several machines where certain hardware components generate unacceptable digital noise which bleeds into the analog audio output. GPUs and HDDs seem to be the absolute worst, but SD card readers certainly make noise too.

I mean, in theory yes, you could make a less noisy SD card, but that seems to be attacking the problem the wrong way. It's better just to get a quality sound interface with really good noise isolation - i.e., _anything_ other than the audio built into the motherboard. That's tip #1 for anyone who knows anything at all about computer audio. You do not use the build-in analog output for anything if you want quality.

Re:Snake oil

[Anonymous Coward]

I have designed an MP3 player that plays off a micro SD card. I had big problems with noise from SD card reads being audible. In my case, the noise was not coming from the signal lines. Instead, it was noise on the power lines. Whenever the card is read, its power consumption spikes and the supply voltage drops slightly. The same supply voltage is used by the sound amplifier, so any fluctuations are audible as noise.

Obviously, a big enough capacitor on the card's supply lines removes the noise, but the capacitor(s) will be huge, too big to fit in a tiny player. I ended up using 6000 uF capacitance on the SD card's power input, so the noise was at an acceptable level. Imagine a 6000 uF electrolyte cap, it is huge!

Re:Snake oil

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to clarify, the frequency you hear is not the frequency of the clock signal or its harmonic. Instead, you hear burst of data read at very short intervals, thousands of times per second.

Re:Snake oil

[X0563511]

I've heard this too, though on mine it was only audible when amplified to absurd levels (well, relatively).

Have you ever had a computer that made odd sounds though the speakers when you move the mouse cursor? In my case, it was a very similar sound. Again, quiet - but if you have it loud enough or it's otherwise quiet enough, you can hear it.

I believe this was a Sansa e200r. It didn't have an SD card, but flash memory - in either case still a lot of digital signaling.

Re:Snake oil

[X0563511]

Not if it's integral.

Re: Snake oil

[Anonymous Coward]

You could have added a voltage regulator to supply the amp only

Re:Snake oil

[gzuckier]

You see things sometimes in equipment that makes you go "?" For instance, decoupling capacitors for the power supply outputs, but instead of putting them on the actual boards, they put them all back on the power supply board so that the inductance of the wiring to the boards would fight them, ?

Re:Snake oil

[Neil Boekend]

Haven't seen that specific case but yeah I have seen some equipment that made me go "?!? How did this design pass checks?"

10% voted yes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn. 10% of the people voted on that article to buy one.

Somehow I'm thinking even those 10% voting yes are just being plain sarcastic.

Real WSJ article

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the real article: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/02/19/sony-to-offer-premium-sound-memory-card/?mod=WSJBlog

Link just goes to some blog post.

For the sake of argument

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, let's just say, for the sake of argument, that these cards create less electrical jiggle when read. My response would still be, "So how does that jiggle in the reading of data make it to the DAC?" My (somewhat) educated guess would be that there's no way, as any jiggle in the DAC would most likely be caused by the power source and not the storage media. Any half wit audiophile that knows anything about basic electronics is gonna know that! Spoken as a three-quarter wit, amateur audiophile. [grin]

Re:For the sake of argument

[Half-pint HAL]

Do you have a separate power source for the DAC and the storage media? No? Then perhaps jiggle in one will cause jiggle in the other...?

Re:For the sake of argument

[Coren22]

Audiophile is a directly opposed value to actual electrical knowledge. People with actual electronics knowledge know enough to laugh at audiophiles.

that's peanuts compared to the tweakers

[The_Rook]

$160 for a memory card may be exorbitant, but at least it is a memory card and does something useful.

while checking for reviews on audio gear (i do appreciate well designed hifi) i saw this review for what looks like a 4" x 6" plastic slab.

http://www.stereotimes.com/post/bybee--quantum-signal-enhancer/

now i have no idea what 'Crystal Technology' is or how it's supposed to work. i'd love it if someone took one of these things and sliced it open to find out what's inside. i suspect it's just a piece of solid plastic. however, i can't think why anyone would spend $119 just to find out. the depressing thing is how credulous the reviewer is and it ultimatly lends doubt on all the site's reviews.

Re:that's peanuts compared to the tweakers

[DrXym]

What about a $500 wooden volume knob which claims to dampen micro vibrations?

Audiophiles are clearly idiots. A rich seam of idiots with a lot of money that companies specialise in exploiting by selling expensive tat to.

As for this Sony thing, the impression appears to be it would offer absolutely no benefit whatsoever to playback though I guess it's conceivable that recording artists and the like would find a use for it if it reduces radio interference when they're trying to record something.

Re:that's peanuts compared to the tweakers

[Half-pint HAL]

Take it to a small airport and grab a quick eyeful of the scanned image....

Re:that's peanuts compared to the tweakers

[MightyYar]

The neat thing about that steaming pile of crap is that all it has to do is add a small amount of resistance and it will change the sound, so that they can claim an effect even in blind tests. Of course, so would a 5 cent resistor. :)

The bizarre quantum claims are outrageous. It doesn't even sound a little bit plausible.

Re:that's peanuts compared to the tweakers

[gzuckier]

of course, on a literal basis, if somebody pays $300 for a gold plated AC plug and thinks it makes it sound better, then if does sound better, to him. The rest of us are sadly unable to appreciate the improvement, because we are stuck on the material plane. we can't do objective analysis of his mental processes. listening to music is all about emotions and other such intangibles; if you're sitting there doing fourier analysis of the waveforms from the speaker and judging how accurate they are, you're not really enjoying it. or: ignorance is bliss. expensive, but bliss.

Audiophile Alert

[Stinky Cheese Man]

They sound even better if you run a green magic marker around the edge. Trust me on this.

Re:Audiophile Alert

[toonces33]

And it is even better if you run a green magic marker around the edge of your ears. And your eyes too for extra credit.

Re:Audiophile Alert

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you got the joke. The DRM on early Sony CDs was easily defeated by "coloring" it in with a marker.

Re:Audiophile Alert

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny but wrong. The green marker audiophile myth comes from audiophiles saying the green will keep the red laser from bouncing around too much and give cleaner sound.

Re:Audiophile Alert

[cdrudge]

I suggest using a red magic marker for the eyes. It will give a warmer appearance to your audio listening activities.

Re:Audiophile Alert

[Half-pint HAL]

And ironically, using such a marker actually destabilised the spin of the disc slightly by adding extra mass to the edges.

Re:Audiophile Alert

[HornWumpus]

Not going to matter at CD speeds.

Old Novell disks were painted/printed thickly on half their surface. They worked until CDs hit about 14x. Then they broke things.

Re:Audiophile Alert

[Half-pint HAL]

Not going to matter at CD speeds.

Perhaps, but for people who're looking for minute improvements, minute instabilities surely matter, right?

Re:Audiophile Alert

[gzuckier]

you need a gold plated magic marker, and you need to demagnetize it.

Lesson learned from VITA cards?

[CanEHdian]

Price-wise sounds like their PlayStation VITA 64GB memory cards...

Re:Lesson learned from VITA cards?

[Anonymous Coward]

But you must think this from their perspective. The bastard game developers took so much of the income from sales of their games and left so little to the poor Sony. So they decided to make games cheaper and increase their cut with a proprietary and expensive as hell memory cards, which were required to store the game. I just wonder, why there are no games to PS Vita..

Re:Lesson learned from VITA cards?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given how ghastly things can get if you try to use a really terrible SD card to do an SSD's job(eg. find the cheapest thing that a camera won't spit out in horror, and then write a liveCD image to it and see how much fun you have), I can understand Sony's desire to guarantee a minimum performance level for an expansion card that they knew would be doing almost nothing but storing executables and art assets.

What is inexcusable is the fact that they decided to spin an entirely new format for that purpose, rather than just telling people that "If you don't use one of these, blessed, microSD cards, on your own head be it if the games stutter".

Still A Fan Of Sony's Portable Audio Devices

[Anonymous Coward]

This card seems silly, but I still like Sony's portable audio devices. I use a Walkman NWZ-A and it's a great audio player. It's about the same price as an iPod but:

-It has an MicroSD card slot to expand storage, unlike an iPod which has no storage expansion.
-It allows you to copy files to it with any file manager, unlike an iPod where you have to use iTunes.
-It plays most formats, including FLAC, unlike an iPod (though they will play FLAC with third party apps).
-It focuses on audio quality, unlike an iPod which is more of an app machine.
-It has physical buttons which make navigating your files easy and allows out to skip tracks and fast forward without have to look at the device.

I prefer a device that does one thing well rather than a million things badly. But then I still prefer to use a dedicated camera instead of a crappy smartphone camera, so maybe the world has passed me by.

Is it backwards compatible with

[Anonymous Coward]

my 8-track car stereo?

This is NOT a scam

[Karganeth]

reddit comment explains why this is useful https://www.reddit.com/r/techn...

Re:This is NOT a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

yes it IS A SCAM. if you are working with audio that needs such precise low noise why the hell would you be working with such poorly built equipment where the SD card can cause interference in the analog signal. People that need such performance don't use shit that would suffer these problems.

Re:This is NOT a scam

[Lunix Nutcase]

No, it is a scam. You would have to be working with shit equipment for electrical noise from an SD card to contribute anything meaningful to the quality of your audio playback/recording.

Re:This is NOT a scam

[bloodhawk]

No the reddit comment doesn't explain it at all. It is bullshit. Any audio equipment of such low quality as to allow such interference from the SD Card would have so many other problems as to make the SD part insignificant. Any quality equipment where sound matters isn't going to be suffering from such a fatal design flaw.

Could happen

[Nethead]

Way back in the day when early digital anything had gobs of TTL and CMOS gate chips I would use a telephone pickup coil to hunt down dead chips.

Re:Could happen

[PopeRatzo]

How did you go about that? It sounds like EVP for chips?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I'm pretty sure it's irrelevant

[msobkow]

I'm pretty sure any power-line noise from a memory card is dwarfed by the poor sound quality of the chip amps used on most portable audio devices.

As to non-portable devices, the noise of case and laptop fans and even the chirp of hard drives seeking drown out any "feedback noise" I get even from the chip amps used in my computers to drive the speakers. While I do spring for low-dB fans whenever I'm replacing them, they still produce an emphatic whoosh in the background no matter how good they are.

Whan I want to really listen to music, I far prefer my Sony noise-cancelling ear-cup headphones to using speakers. Ambient noise in this place is just too high to really enjoy music any other way. And I suspect the same is true of most homes that don't have dedicated sound rooms with thousands of dollars invested in baffling, damping, and so forth.

Re:I'm pretty sure it's irrelevant

[BronsCon]

I'm pretty sure any power-line noise from a memory card is dwarfed by the poor sound quality of the chip amps used on most portable audio devices.

Yes and no. If your amplifier is taking a microwatt-level signal and turning it into a milliwatt-level signal, you're also amplifying any noise by a factor of 1000 or more. GIGO comes to mind; now, your low-quality chip amp might put out garbage either way, but at least you can filter out some of the smellier stuff, if you catch my drift.

Re:I'm pretty sure it's irrelevant

[GWBasic]

I just bought a Sony Xperia Z3 phone. The sound amp chips on that phone are very high quality.

Honestly, the concept of a "Sony" audiophile SD card is tempting, for two reasons:

• There's a lot of finicky SD cards out there, and buying the phone with a "Sony" SD card lowers perceived risk of getting a finicky SD card.
• The high-frequency interference issues that many other posters discuss.

I did get a 128GB card for my phone. If there was a Sony Audiophile card available, and it was only 20-30% more expensive than a normal card, I'd probably get it more for the peace of mind aspect than trying to make my phone's music please my dog's ears.

Re:I'm pretty sure it's irrelevant

[HornWumpus]

How good are the speakers on a water proof phone going to be? Likely the same speakers as my Z1.

If you are listening via a bluetooth connection it won't matter. Only wired headphones will be impacted.

Re:I'm pretty sure it's irrelevant

[GWBasic]

Actually, the speakers are shockingly better than my two other nexus phones! When I use headphones, I used wired headphones.

It's kinda surprising, but Sony really made a better phone than the iPhone. I guess they've come a long way since the iPod ate their lunch.

Re:I'm pretty sure it's irrelevant

[HornWumpus]

Watch out for Sony's stamina mode. You need to manually add any apps that you want to keep running when the phone sleeps (e.g. gmail and skype).

The way the phones push stamina mode, you'd think they'd have the bugs out.

Re:I'm pretty sure it's irrelevant

[strikethree]

Whan I want to really listen to music, I far prefer my Sony noise-cancelling ear-cup headphones to using speakers. Ambient noise in this place is just too high to really enjoy music any other way.

Then you are not turning the speakers up loud enough. Funnily enough, the CAPTCHA is demolish.

Seriously, someone was asking me to tell the difference between a wav file and an mp3 file, both were sent to me as a wav. Once I turned the volume up loud enough I was correct on one song 100% of the time (Primus - My Name is Mud) and 2/3 of the time for a Metallica song. I would have had perfect detection for mp3 on the Metallica song but I had my amp (accidentally) still munging music to make MP3s sound better. The Primus song is never in question when encoded as an MP3. Something about it defeats the algorithm no matter how you tune it.

my mouse makes noise

[Anonymous Coward]

dunno if anyone will actually read this, but here goes.

every single eletronic component i have makes an audible noise.
it's never very much noice but when i place my mouse next to my head, i can hear it.
AC wiring makes noise, AC-DC converters make noise. everythign makes noise.

i don't actually care about the interference potential, i barely care about the actual noise either.

HOWEVER it is nice that progress is being made, if any.

could go on about paradigm shifts and suppressed technologies BUT THIS IS SLASHDOT no one cares about shit like that.

captcha raptly

well

[slashmydots]

I can hear my CPU and GPU through my headphones on my computer so this isn't completely ridiculous but pretty ridiculous.

Re:well

[Anonymous Coward]

An SD generates a tiny fraction of the noise that a CPU and GPU generate. If you are in a situation where such miniscule amounts of noise are significant you will be using very high end stuff that this won't be an issue in.

Spool up to RAM

[OrangeTide]

Do I need this if I can spool up the entire audio file to RAM before playing? It might be annoying to have such a delay for playback though. For recording it seems like less of a problem as long as your audio buffer is very large. Rough estimate is a 4 track at 196 kHz 24-bit would eat 1GB ever 7.7 minutes. So maybe 16 GB of RAM needed to buffer a 2 hour session (really bare minimum to be practical in my opinion). Seems like it's possible now but what kind of noise does a 64-bit ARMv8 and 16 GB of LPDDR4 add to your audio ? I suspect my proposed device would cost significantly more than $160 retail as well, you might be better off with the fancy SD card. (assuming they are equivalent, which they almost certainly are not)

Re:Spool up to RAM

[drinkypoo]

The only people who need their audio to be this clean are people who are recording it, and they will get quiet audio by using an external sound card.

Re:Spool up to RAM

[OrangeTide]

That doesn't sound terribly portable.

Re:Spool up to RAM

[drinkypoo]

That doesn't sound terribly portable.

I don't see why not. There's loads of USB microphones which don't look any different from normal ones except for the plug, and no small number of other USB devices which look no different from a cable alone.

SD cards make noise?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wasn't aware that Secure Digital cards make noise when reading or writing data. It is not like the card has a disk that spins up and an actuator arm inside. When I copy photos from my camera to my external hard drive, I hear my computer's fan running and the external drive writing data. I must be missing something.

Re:SD cards make noise?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I'm eagerly awaiting the new premium lens for my camera that prevents the photons it's focusing on the CCD array from interfering with the other electronics in the camera, SD card included. Nothing is more annoying than that noise the stray photons make bouncing around the camera electronics and stuff. I'm guessing that would be a $2000 lens, perhaps gold colored plated. ;)

Re:SD cards make noise?

[jones_supa]

Electrical noise. It's when the electronic signal picks up some crust. It's generally not audible, unless some circuitry happens to make it audible.

Re:SD cards make noise?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

They don't directly generate any sound(unlike systems, like CPU/GPU power supply circuitry, that have enough magnetics to really whine under the right load); but basically any digital bus puts out some EMI(not the litigious one, the noisy one) so if your audio player hardware is total shit the analog signal lines may pick some up and feed it into the amp, producing a variety of deeply unpleasant effects.

The root problem in such a case is that the analog lines for the sound output are grossly under-isolated from the rest of the system(and it's likely that one or more other high speed digital busses are scribbling on them) so trying to solve the problem with fancy SD cards is a bit of a waste; but electrical noise seeping into the audio output is certainly a real thing, especially on lousy gear with space and cost constraints.

Seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

What the actual fuck?! Why?!

Re:Seriously

[BronsCon]

Signal cables on the elevators, power cables on the ground, or on a separate set of elevators. It actually does make a difference; however, a cheaper solution (and one that I use) is to put hooks or screws (screws are often more convenient) in the wall to hang the cables off of. You can commonly bundle all of your power cables together, then all of your twisted pair, then separate out other cables based on signal level (e.g. all the line-level, which should be shielded, go together, and speaker cables really only need be separated if you're gonna get REALLY anal about it, but the truth is *nobody* is going to hear the difference).

Twisted pair is pretty resilient and can probably be bundled alongside most power cables without introducing noise; the same applies to a well-shielded signal cable, or even a speaker cable, in most installations (e.g. your home). But, there's something to be said for separating them, should an amp short out and melt its power cable. Sending 120 or 240 down your ethernet or line-level cables probably won't make your equipment happy, and I'm sure your speakers wouldn't be all too thrilled about having raw 124 or 240 fed to them, either.

So yes, those elevators do solve an actual problem. They're not the best solution (hooks and/or screws are cheaper and at least as effective, probably more so, while taking up less floorspace), but they are a solution. For suckers.

Re:Seriously

[rwise2112]

So yes, those elevators do solve an actual problem. They're not the best solution (hooks and/or screws are cheaper and at least as effective, probably more so, while taking up less floorspace), but they are a solution. For suckers.

But one of the reviews says: "The damn things do lower noise, increase dynamics, remove haze, and open up the top octaves. Once you listen to their effects, even a skeptic like me has to admit that it is hard to take them back out of the system. Music sounds more like music with the Cable Elevators in place. I recommend them strongly, especially given their price!".

How can you argue with that? LOL

Re: Seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

Twisted pair is resilient? Twisted pair just means it will pick up equal noise so it can be removed with diff amps on the receiving end. If you don't have that, your twisted pair does sweet fuck all for preventing noise.

Re:Seriously

[gzuckier]

So yes, those elevators do solve an actual problem. They're not the best solution (hooks and/or screws are cheaper and at least as effective, probably more so, while taking up less floorspace), but they are a solution. For suckers.

But one of the reviews says: "The damn things do lower noise, increase dynamics, remove haze, and open up the top octaves. Once you listen to their effects, even a skeptic like me has to admit that it is hard to take them back out of the system. Music sounds more like music with the Cable Elevators in place. I recommend them strongly, especially given their price!".

How can you argue with that? LOL

Well, you are elevating them to a point of lower gravitational field (1/r^2 and all that) and of course, relativistically that means less time dilation, so of course it will be more accurate. Same as losing weight, your lowered mass in the listening room will diminish the gravitional field around the wiring and improve the sound.

I liked the previous Sony

[Anonymous Coward]

What if Sony tried to compete with quality products, instead of these scams? Previously Sony was famous for its devices, which would last longer than their competitors. But then some bean counter started to lower the quality one piece a time, and soon the internet is full of stories for Sony TV:s that last only a year or two. If Sony stopped from competing with the cheapest crap, did their engineering well and put a 5 year warranty to the devices, I would trade my LG and Samsung any day for them. I don't care, if the device costs a little more, if I get a longer warranty with it. But I would not pay a dime for vague promises of sharper bits or less EMR.

Re:I liked the previous Sony

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Maybe they could turn it around, they at least have enough assets to burn to give them some time; but I'd be a little pessimistic about Sony just because they don't seem to have a clue when it comes to software. Some of the products from their glory days definitely have some firmware burned into them, so it's not as though they are utterly incapable of writing any kind of code; but UI/UX and user-facing software are more or less uniformly horrific on Sony products. Unfortunately for them, that's increasingly the part of the product that isn't entirely commodified, and where there is a real difference between companies.

It's somewhat like watching Nintendo try to comprehend what happened to the console market, now that "Having online services that actually works" has become something of a requirement.

So I guess I'll stop using

[Anonymous Coward]

Explosively pumped flux compression generators to store my 0 & 1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator

Mayby not as bullshit as it sounds...

[BronsCon]

This could actually make a difference for portable devices with crap power supplies or crap/dying batteries. No jokes. Of course, proper decoupling on the SD reader circuit, and/or proper power filtering, would have the same effect. I would imagine, though, that this card, if it works as advertised, would reduce distortion and noise on lower-end (maybe not bottom of the barrel) MP3 players that lack proper decoupling and filtering; and when the price gap between the low-end and high-end players is more than the price of one of these cards (and even more than the price differential between one of these cards and the one you would otherwise be buying anyway), it may well be a viable option for the listener who bought the player they could afford and is less than thrilled with how it sounds.

Think about it, you have $99 to spend on a player, so you get what you can; a cheapie player with mediocre sound. You then scrape together $160 and grab one of these cards. If there's any merit to this card at all, if it introduces any level of internal decoupling or power filtering, above what the player already provides, that $259 expenditure may well result in sound comparable to a much more expensive player.

Or, it may be complete bullshit. I'll wait for the independent tests before ridiculing it, though; and I won't buy it either way. Well, unless I can get faster read/write speeds and. or better battery life out of my dSLR with it, which I'm sure someone will eventually test, as well, even if it's not the goal of this card.

Re:Mayby not as bullshit as it sounds...

[jones_supa]

Good point. If the SD card power filtering is parallel to the circuit of the rest of the player, it might even give some extra power filtering to the analog stage.

Re:Mayby not as bullshit as it sounds...

[drinkypoo]

The SD controller is inside the SoC, so you need to add filtering someplace, you can't just isolate the circuit. But nothing you do to the SD card will improve the DAC, which is the real reason why most portable audio hardware blows. The DAC itself introduces more distortion than you get from device noise, so who cares?

Re:Mayby not as bullshit as it sounds...

[BronsCon]

GIGO. Maybe you're getting garbage out either way, but think about it; you're taking a microvolt-level signal from the DAC and amplifying it to millivolts (for headphones) or more (for speakers); that's, at a minimum, a factor of 1000. The less garbage you put in, the less garbage you get out. It might not be a miracle cure for crap sound quality, but it certainly can be an improvement for someone who has $99 this month and $160 next month, but may never be able to save up for actual decent hardware or, maybe, whose ears can't quite pick out the distortion from the shitty DAC, but can hear the switching noise introduced by a shit SD card. For the latter, it really would be night and day.

A bit more background: The distortion introduced by the DAC will be somehow related to the input provided to the DAC. That is, it will be mathematically derived from the sound it is supposed to be creating anyway. The brain can (and often does) work to mask that so you don't notice it unless you're really *really* looking for it. MP3 compression pretty much works on that same principle, and most here would say that, while it's not perfect, it's more than adequate for the vast majority of listening environments. Switching noise, on the other hand, is related to what the device is doing at a given moment; if it ends up in the audible range, it's a second audio stream that your ears are picking up, which your brain *will* try and process. There is no masking applied by your auditory system that can allow you to just ignore that, under any circumstance.

Actually, I may have misspoken about that last bit. I'm pretty sure you can ignore it when you're dead but, then, you probably aren't heading much of the actual music, either. So yeah, for an actual living, breathing, person with working ears, there's a massive difference between distortion and switching noise. Draw down the power supply at an audible rate by doing some operation that starts and stops switching less than 22.1k times per second and *someone* will hear it. If the load is heavy enough or the power supply or batteries are weak enough, you may even be able to unplug the headphones and hear the components, themselves.

Re:Mayby not as bullshit as it sounds...

[Half-pint HAL]

Distortion is pretty random. Bus noise is blippity-blippity. I'd forgotten what my old micro-SD-equipped MP3 player sounded like until this discussion. That said, the blippity-blippity was mostly restricted to navigating the folder structure, weirdly....

Noisy SSDs

[lyberth]

I have had some issues with a Dell laptop, that gave off high pitched sounds when using the disk - but only while on battery. i don't know if it was the SSD it self, the controler or the LED that flashes when the disk is used, but while a very low squeek, it was still annoying.

Re:Noisy SSDs

[drinkypoo]

I have had some issues with a Dell laptop, that gave off high pitched sounds when using the disk - but only while on battery. i don't know if it was the SSD it self, the controler or the LED that flashes when the disk is used,

It was probably the power supply, then.

Re:Noisy SSDs

[omnichad]

Listen to some loud music for a while. You'll lose those upper frequencies and won't care anymore.

It's right up there with platinum plated RCA cable

[guacamole]

and with $60 HDMI cables.

It's usually a.

[denzacar]

a. the MP3 player is badly designed. There should be sufficient capacitance to smooth the power level out to within a few percent of standard even at full read or write. Alternatively the audio traces could be routed too close to the data lines or the designer for the DAC may have had a bad day.
This means that the MP3 player was cheap enough that the designers weren't allowed the time to test their design properly.

Let's face it - from the Quality-Cheap-Quick triangle (pick any two) 'a' covers TWO possibilities.
Meaning that it will ALWAYS be present in anything you can purchase with money alone without waiting for years for someone to design and build and test it specially, just for you.

And no... paying premium MONEY for design is not the solution.
Only premium TIME spent on design-testing-redesign-retesting... counts for something.
So one ends up with an overpriced AND outdated 128MB player that plays their 64 bps MP3s without any outside noise whatsoever.
Making everyone in their retirement home jealous of their superior audio bling. Or not.

Which brings us back to SONY, who MAY actually be rectifying a real problem and not selling snake oil.
AND...
Should they actually succeed, they are opening further possibilities to future designers who now don't have to care about that one issue anymore.

Looking for noise? Start at the mic.

[geekmux]

So, let me get this straight. A "professional" pop artist today walks into a studio to drop a track, which is then Autotuned, excited, boosted, compressed, and otherwise destroyed by post-processing...

...and we're now worried about macro-levels of electrical noise coming from the memory card?

Perhaps we should worry more about what we define as an "artist" these days.

Ground ripple

[Anonymous Coward]

I better card might do things like reduce ground ripple which would effect a cheap audio amplifiers output. I'm sure what Sony says is technically accurate but in reality the effect is probably so small that no one will be able to hear the difference.

Big Market for these

[rjune]

They used PT Barnum for their marketing analysis: (paraphrased) "There is a potential customer born every minute."

You've got it all wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an old laptop that I partially disassembled around 2007 or 2008 because I was trying to find out why, when scrolling a pageful of text, it made a sound similar to scraping or scratching. I was mystified when as near as I could tell, it was coming out of the memory chips. I have found many other SD and other forms of memory cards that "make sound" when you read data off of them. You can hear it. It's not electrical interference, it's actual sound coming off the cards themselves.

That could be cheap-ass componenents - not going to argue this beyond saying the Sony Premium Sound stuff isn't cheap. Perhaps that's good then? Sony figured "What the heck, it's easy to develop this, costs us a bit more, but if people will buy it because they hate the scritch-scritch their camera makes as it saves the picture on THAT card and the quieter scratch-scratch on THAT OTHER card, then maybe it was worth it because THIS card won't make those sounds."

Re:Looking for noise? Start at the mic.

[Overzeetop]

Kanye would like to have a word with you...

No shit

[Sycraft-fu]

I get tired of seeing audio 'tards try to claim an expensive solution is needed to badly designed gear. I've seen this bullshtit with regards to S/PDIF cables and poorly designed DACs. It is true that you can get clock skew, reflections, etc with some cables. However any DAC worth its shit today should reclock and buffer the incoming signal, thus rendering transmission issues moot (so long as the signal is coherent enough to transfer the data). However, there are shitty "audiophile" DACs that don't and they try to use it as some kind of "proof" about cable quality.

What it comes down to is there are issues and they can be engineered around. When it comes to digital and noise ya, digital devices are noisy. Guess what? You properly ground and shield your analogue section and it is not an issue. It isn't like this is something super expensive and thus only available on the high end, just requires proper engineering. The answer isn't reducing digital noise since there is little that can be done on that front overall, it is making the analogue section immune to it.

But will it penetrate the hide of a chimera?

[pkinetics]

For those who don't know the joke read the reviews

Spyware

[Anonymous Coward]

And of course it will record your voice and any other sounds in the area of your microphone and will send that data to Sony so they can use it in background loops and such for their moviews and other media, and they will use it in other ways too.

Read their so called EULA and see for yourself.

pricey?

[stoatwblr]

That depends on their speed.

The going rate for 95R/95W MB/s 64Gb microSDXC devices is between $90 (Sandisk) and $130 (Samsung) depending on the maker.

The fact that these don't have any speed rating on them doesn't inspire much confidence.

Other articles say "class 10", but all devices faster than 10MB/s are class 10 and SDXC requires that as min spec. The UHS ratings would be more relevant.

On the other hand, it's Sony and they're reknowned for gold plating turds.

Re:Looking for noise? Start at the mic.

[gzuckier]

So, let me get this straight. A "professional" pop artist today walks into a studio to drop a track, which is then Autotuned, excited, boosted, compressed, and otherwise destroyed by post-processing...

...and we're now worried about macro-levels of electrical noise coming from the memory card?

Perhaps we should worry more about what we define as an "artist" these days.

Exactly. I remember when CDs were the New Thing (Christ am I old) and people were enthusing about you could recognize them on the car stereo because they sounded so clear; and I was thinking if you can recognize them through the junk that makes up a commercial pop recording, played on a pop radio station through their equipment, through the average car stereo of that era...... then they must really be cranking out some very noticeable distortion. From what I understand, we went through the exact same thing when solid state replaced tubes, "list to the crystal clarity" which turned to be high freq distortions, of course. Thank God I'm not That Old to remember it myself though.