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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 $160 memory cards, which the company brags offers "Premium Sound" that generates less electrical noise when reading data." As long as it works well with my hi-fi ethernet cable.
And a Monster Cable USB cable. Not really. But the VGA card in my 286 used to make noise when it was scrolling a block of text.
I see they have gold colored print, that has to boost the sound quality by about 10 bucks. But is Monster selling titanium-plated connectors for them yet? Have any advertisers signed up to preload audio advertisements on the cards? This doesn't seem ready for prime time. Sony, give me a call just as soon as you're ready to start charging me a monthly fee!
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
but electrical noise is actually a real problem for audio work.
Which should be dealt with at the analog end of the audio circuit.
SD cards are in the digital side. Analog and digital sides don't mix in any sane circuit design. But then this is for people that buy those Monster HDMI, Ethernet and other digital signaling cables.
I have dark confession, I own gold-plated HDMI cable. Now before you judge me...
... you judged me anyways! But I got it on Going Out of Business Sale! For 5$ out of a bin! I had to! You too would buy one for $5. They sell them for hundreds to fools!
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.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Do we even know that these are being marketed to end users? Are these not just shielded memory cards?
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
$15.99
I come here for the love
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.
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.
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.
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).
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
There's no switching (or otherwise) power supply in a SD card though. Not much of anything other than flash and a controller.
Sent from my PDP-11
You should probably sit back down in your armchair.
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.
$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.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
They sound even better if you run a green magic marker around the edge. Trust me on this.
Price-wise sounds like their PlayStation VITA 64GB memory cards...
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
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.
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.
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.
reddit comment explains why this is useful https://www.reddit.com/r/techn...
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.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
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.
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.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
I can hear my CPU and GPU through my headphones on my computer so this isn't completely ridiculous but pretty ridiculous.
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.
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
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.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Don't you dare make fun of my $120 cable elevators.
http://www.musicdirect.com/p-9...
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
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."
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, also check that the wifi is off... No shit.
What the actual fuck?! Why?!
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.
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.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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?"
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.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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.
There isn't much like the scent of a fresh harddisk
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.
It's so i can put my music on it and get better sound quality when i play it on my car stereo.
and with $60 HDMI cables.
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.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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.
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.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
> 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.)
They used PT Barnum for their marketing analysis: (paraphrased) "There is a potential customer born every minute."
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.
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.
"Because Apple has a trademark on squares with rounded corners?" /duck
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
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.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
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.
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.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
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...?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
If the analog side of a device is not electrically shielded, then you are doing it wrong. Stop buying cheap garbage.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Kanye would like to have a word with you...
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
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.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
Audiophile is a directly opposed value to actual electrical knowledge. People with actual electronics knowledge know enough to laugh at audiophiles.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
For those who don't know the joke read the reviews
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.
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
A steal at $144.75.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Ever realized most of these > 12 bit ADCs actually have 2 or more bits that are always noise? Read the datasheet.
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.
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.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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!
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
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.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Sony don't make memory devices - ram or flash.
Even when they had their own form factors, they didn't make the internals.
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.
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.
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.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
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.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Diode. I meant diode.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'