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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.
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.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
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.
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.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
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.
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.