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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 $160 memory cards, which the company brags offers "Premium Sound" that generates less electrical noise when reading data." As long as it works well with my hi-fi ethernet cable.
I see they have gold colored print, that has to boost the sound quality by about 10 bucks. But is Monster selling titanium-plated connectors for them yet? Have any advertisers signed up to preload audio advertisements on the cards? This doesn't seem ready for prime time. Sony, give me a call just as soon as you're ready to start charging me a monthly fee!
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
but electrical noise is actually a real problem for audio work.
Which should be dealt with at the analog end of the audio circuit.
SD cards are in the digital side. Analog and digital sides don't mix in any sane circuit design. But then this is for people that buy those Monster HDMI, Ethernet and other digital signaling cables.
I have dark confession, I own gold-plated HDMI cable. Now before you judge me...
... you judged me anyways! But I got it on Going Out of Business Sale! For 5$ out of a bin! I had to! You too would buy one for $5. They sell them for hundreds to fools!
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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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.
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.
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.
They sound even better if you run a green magic marker around the edge. Trust me on this.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Don't you dare make fun of my $120 cable elevators.
http://www.musicdirect.com/p-9...
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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
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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.
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