Thanks Dave. I can't think of a better way to start this video than they way you did. It really demonstrates that this action from Sony's marketing team does not just insult the consumer, but also insults a history of great innovation from Sony. Sony, you stand on the shoulders of giants, and you chose to crap on them.
Yep, and those "waterproof" Xperia phones! Waterproof my ass! How can they market a phone as waterproof if it get's wet inside when you left it, sealed as the warranty requires, on the rain?
ivanjacob If it was with my phone than the warranty should have taken care of it! They refused to deem the damage warranty coverable without even touching the phone! By the way it has not been dropped or scratched at all!
Ben! Nice to see you here. Seems similar to the megapixel race... Its sad that such a big company will stoop to these lows to make a buck. Once that data passes through any type of digital process the amount of noise from an sd card is totally BOGUS. Low phase noise produced by a crystal oscillator for a DAC is important on the other hand. Love your vids Ben.
Mace Moneta I read it, and then the original blog posts. How the heck did sony manage to get away with this? They literally made a virus and it was not even in the eula, like it would had to be
Mace Moneta In their defense, Dave's entire video is about their (consumer) electronics. The rootkit thing was their Music Entertainment branch. If you think that still taints the entire company from consumer electronics to medical imaging to financial services - well, that's one way to look at it.
Audiophools is right. I know a few of them myself. One guy paid 1,000 for a 1 meter HDMI cable that I broke when I was working at his house. I offered him a 5.00 replacement one and he just about had a stroke he was so upset. Was seeing artifacts on his TV that for the life of me I couldn't see at all, and I have perfect vision. Naturally he also had the #2 guage speaker wires, all laid out across his floor with stand offs, holding it 4" off the floor and keeping the conductors exactly 3" separated from each other, to take the audio from his 10 watt mono block tube amps to some ugly horn speakers that probably cost more than his house. Roof is covered in tarps, and he is driving a 40 year old car that has rust holes as big as baseballs, but inside there was an easy 200,000 in hifi and video gear. Audiophools and vidiots one in the same.
Bear in mind that Sony helped develop the original CD standard, which was based off of years of scientific research determining that 16 bit 44.1 kHz audio can sufficiently achieve the full potential of human hearing. They are currently directly contradicting that research and I'm pretty sure human hearing hasn't evolved in the last few decades. Besides 24 bit 192 kHz audio being completely unnecessary, people think that Sony has figured out how to produce purer ones and zeroes!
You're right about this Dave, but Sony jumped the shark long ago with proprietary formats, buying music and film divisions and handing them over to total assholes who go around putting malware on CDs, paying bribes for airtime, and suing their customers. And many are pissed at the neutering the PS3's "alternate OS support" with a mandatory firmware update.
The whole otherOS debacle is the entire reason why I refuse to buy anything Sony related and one of the reasons I got the Xbox one over the ps4. Some people might think it's a stupid reason but when you're damn near broke and your console could be used as a backup computer till you could get parts for repair, it was a godsend to have and to have that ability taken away from you when you paid for it to begin with is just a major piss off and a slap to the face.
TheOmegaRevolution WTF? Looks like you have no knowledge of this story, bro. They made it ONLY to avoid additional charges, to sell PS3 as a "home computer", not entertainment system or tv/video/audio class of device.
John Freeman I know a lot more about the story than I cared to put in that post buddy, sometimes it's just best to get to the point. Now I suggest you get the fuck over it and move on.
EEVblog After having analysed the footage with my low noise Sony marker physics simulator it appeared to have bounced off the right side of your head, it flew 1.03 meter away from the whiteboard at a 7.34 degree angle to the right perpendicular facing away from the whiteboard. rotational analysis has shown it tumbled 2.7 times and landed on its back, kicking it more to the right and rolling for 0.5 meters on a hard carpet floor or until obstructed.
AOL! Oh, I mean - LOL! Classic Dave - I am sure that the virgin iridium hand bonded dies make those odd harmonic transients more reflective in the brain pan. And more mercury always means more better. Cheers!
It's digital storage you either get your original file back that can be played or it's corrupted and unplayable. In theory you could dump an MP3 onto a couple of floppies or even several cases of punched cards and it would not degrade so long as the media can be read. Now what a higher quality card could do is handle more rewrites or be less likely to become corrupted etc.
"Mercury encapsulated symetrical parallel stacked noise averaging unobtanium doped die" "Solid iridium bond wires hand bonded by nude virgins" "1000hr burn-in with rick astley's 'never gonna give you up' or optional mc hammer 'u can't touch this' " Welp, aussie humour never fails to deliver! I'll have all of that to go, thank you.
How much better will my audio get if I load the audio files from the low noise SDXC card, into my NAS, then stream the music from the NAS, to my PC using the $10,000 ethernet cables, then play it over the DAC in a USB amp which is connected to the PC using the $6000 audiophile grade USB cables?
but your NIC and USB controller will degrade the signal! I bet you haven't even replaced your motherboard traces with pure silver or even canned your setup in a titanium-sealed box! HEATHEN. /s
***** Don't forget that even a digital signal is ultimately transferred in analog medium... so by making a really good cable you can decrease the noise and harness that characteristic to make longer cables, for example. (Of course the $10k Ethernet cable is still nonsense.)
My morning so far: Wake from Hibernation Mode. Turn on computer. See new EEVBlog "Ah, good." Read full title. Short pause to recall WTH Sony's 'Audiophile' card is about. (I read about it a few days ago) Sluggish neurons connect.... "OH!" "This is going to be brutal!" Big smile! Big sip of coffee. Ah! Life just doesn't get any better. :D THANKS, DAVE!!
I remember being told that gold CDs were supposed to sound better than silver ones. I knew right then and there that is was bullshit. It's 1's and 0's folks. You can't make a better 1 or a better 0. Oh, and monster cables.. What a joke. Audiofools, great term!
The Regency TR-1 (1954) and Philco Safari (1959) were the world's first transistor radio and battery-powered portable TV, respectively. Maybe Sony had the first of those to be made in Japan, but not globally.
Thanks, you made my day. Double facepalm doesn't even begin to cover it. Reminds me of those so-called audiophiles who would tell you that gold-plated CDs sounded better than aluminium-plated ones. Or that you should spend $15.000 for a CD-player with only a digital output, not D/A converters.
Audiophiles buy high end DAC's and invest in good design, high quality parts. A true audiophile knows that a digital siginal is not prone to noise. It is 1 or 0
***** I agree with you, but the TRUE audiophile (one who simply appreciates decent music quality) has had the term stolen, much like Hi-Fi used to be 'High Fidelity", and then became "some pile of crap"...
timecop1080 please say that was trolling... tubes distort sound (yes they degrade the quality), a true audiophile would want their music to sound exactly how the producer wanted it to sound for them not to make it sound how they want it to sound.
who cares how prone digital signals are to noise? we're talking about a card designed to have lower electromagnetic emissions for use in devices which (whether you're recording or playing back sound) require amplifying analog electrical signals.
Listen mate. I don't give a shit what you say, they work. I bought 3 of these. One for my phone, one for my car, and one for my PC. It sounds AMAZING. The rich deep lows, the clean crisps highs. Worth every penny. I even plugged one in to my cat, it's much lower noise now. SCREW THE HATERS!!
They're talking about electrical noise caused by the flash memory. Obviously if your audio files stay in the digital domain all the way through, the storage medium can't affect how they sound, but if you're converting from digital to analogue for playback, or even worse, converting from analogue to digital during recording, then electrical noise from the flash card can definitely affect audio quality. It may not be as earth-shattering as the Walkman, but electrically noisy flash memory is a real problem and if it works, this is a useful product. It would be really cool if you would do a video measuring the noise on an SD card bus to show just how severe it can be. You're one of the few people talking about this with the knowledge and equipment to objectively measure how bad most cards do and how better, if any, this card does. Flash reading/writing noise can be heard on the audio output of some devices, so a low noise card would be useful there, and I'd expect it to be even more useful on flash-based recording devices, where the signal of interest is at a lower level. Yeah, the ideal solution would be encasing the analog and digital parts of your circuit in separate machined aluminum cases and using decoupling caps the size of a soda can, but if that's not practical, or if you're just a user not a designer, swapping out for a lower noise flash card is a quick, easy improvement.
But as Dave said, if their product is really that sensitive to microvolt interference, then they don't deserve to call themselves electrical engineers. They can be assured that they are likely to face even greater levels of emi from external sources.
You might be underestimating just how much noise a flash card puts out. There's a charge pump to create the high programming voltage and large current pulses during page erases, they're really one of the most noisy components around today. Yes, any EE worth his salt should be able to design an audio circuit immune to that. But there's a lot of bad EEs out there, or good EEs building down to a price, and so *there are plenty of audio devices affected by electrical noise from the sd card out there* from a load of companies. Really though, the only way to know for sure whether this is useful is to measure it. I wish Dave would get some actual data behind this one before going into rant mode. All it takes is one model of audio device that uses flash and doesn't have enough isolation for the upgrade this device (potentially) represents to be useful.
***** That's true, but how many writes or page clears does the memory do while playing back music? None, they're all reads and this is sufficient to make it useless for 99.9999% of the public. If you need to record sound to such a high level of fidelity that sd card noise becomes a problem then you have to buy a better recording device, not a noiseless card. Anyway this card is clearly not intended for recording only since is publicized as "the perfect companion for the Walkman ZX2" (a 1.200$ mp3 player). His rant is perfectly spot on since Sony says "Buy this more expensive card, your music will sound better" and that's is simply not true! I bet almost every one who bought this memory found a difference while listening, but it's just a mix of placebo effect and cognitive dissonance so they don't have to face the fact that they paid 150$ for the something they could get for 30$.
***** So you actually say that this 5x priced memory card is for those who use cheap-ass badly designed equipment that are affected from the cards electrical noise?
Johnny Doe Badly designed doesn't always mean cheap. The improvement made by this card can be much cheaper than upgrading to a better designed piece of equipment.
yes, this is iTunes business model. The sound quality is literally worse than a 30 year old CD. Pretty sure all the record labels were laughing like drains at Steve Jobs... until he started selling more than them.
***** *iPod* = DAP (Digital Audio Player). Invented by British scientist Kane Kramer in 1979 and the first commercial DAP was the AT&T FlashPAC in 1998. *iPhone* = Smartphone. First ever touch-screen smartphone was the IBM Simon Personal Communicator in 1994. *Macbook Air* = Subnotebook. First released by Compaq in 1990 as the Compaq LTE. *iPad* = Tablet Computer. in September 1989, GRiD Systems release the first commercially available tablet-type portable computer, the GRiDPad. So no, Apple did not develop any of those technologies. They simply slapped an Apple logo on technologies that were already in the market, jacked up the prices and sold them to rich socialites and cafe-latte sipping hipsters.
Haha this made me laugh really hard, thank you for that! I was really wondering where this video was going to and I had no idea what was to come. Being quite a fan of Sony myself and knowing about their innovations in the broadcast industry, I was really doubtful about the concept of an Audiophile SD card. But thank god you saved it in the end! Doing lots of sound design, and audio engineering myself this product looks completely bogus to me, being it that everything is stored in bits and bytes on every memory card the same anyways. It really pretty much the same type of scam as with those super expensive HDMI cables, which is just a digital signal that either works, or it doesn't, there is no in between. I honestly feel sorry for the people that buy into sort of crap, they could have spend their money on so many other things that would have actually mattered a big deal quality wise like: a good pair of headphones or speakers, a good interface, a good audio player, lossless music, or just a few extra bucks to spend on that display you wanted that you would have spend otherwise on this super expensive HDMI cable. Thanks for debunking this! Such a shame audiophiles are such an easy and gullible target, mostly because of the huge cloud of misinformation and false marketing schemes out there. Thanks for putting a stop to that!
Dave, I apologize in advance for being pedantic. :) The professional "Beta" was called Betacam, released in the early 1980's. About the only thing shared was the cassette shell. Recording format, tape speed were all different. Betamax is a composite "Color-Under" format, Betacam was a component format with separate tracks for luminance and chroma. First transistor pocket radio was the Regency TR-1 (1954), built in my home town of Indianapolis.
The insane fringe of audiphiles who go for stuff like this will stop and nothing to prove they know something engineers don't, and that the rest of us just don't get it. It's like the worst parts of tinfoil hat conspiracy theory logic used to justify $1000 cables and 5x cost SDHC cards. Stupidity bugs me, but sometimes you have to just let it go and tell them to go be stupid somewhere else. There are similar debates among analog synthesizer enthusiasts who insist that through-hole construction has an inherently "warmer" sound than surface mount. I've even seen small-time manufacturers trying to play on this.
This product announcement really made me roll my eyes too a low noise memory card...when no doubt every track played is stored in RAM anyway. Yes Sony you win a prize, the booby prize.
almost as stupid as premium 2M HDMI cables listed here for $1K. its all Fucking digital. you either get a signal/picture, or you don't! the only exception is attenuation over distance, in which you will get packet loss and eventually no signal at all! complete pisstake
Well... I agree that a $1K HDMI Cable is moon priced. But: Just because it is digital. does not mean that the cheapest of the cheapest cable from alibaba can't cause problem like lost packets or jitter that are visible in the picture. Or when on the construction side some idiot places heavy material on top of an Ethernet cable spool, this can fuck up the signal integrity do the point of working marginally (which can be more annoying then when it is clearly defective). As engineers we should be careful with statements like "it is digital, so the cable does not matter" as there are the cheapest of the cheapest cables that kind of work, but not full fill their spec.
sarowie WE? Are you an engineer? When people say "it is digital, so the cable doesn't matter" that is said on the assumption that the cable meets the specifications required to call it (enter whatever digital cable here). So in that sense, as long as it meets the bare minimum requirements and is within specs, it doesn't matter if it has silver, gold or is encrusted with diamonds, 0s and 1s are 0s and 1s. Sure if the cable is garbage and doesn't meet the specifications set forth it may have issues. But let me end with this, I have 8 dollar HDMI cables that perform the same as any shit Monster has on the market and that is the point.
sarowie I ordered the cheapest hdmi cable I could find on amazon to use for my Playstation 3, picture was grainy as hell and couldn't go to the highest resolutions without getting more and more grainy. Bought a slightly higher priced cable (20$ or so, nothing moon priced), and guess what, no noise, no grain, highest resolutions! So you are right, the price may make a difference between ultra cheap and medium priced. But I don't think the difference between medium priced and "boutique" priced are that amazing.
***** Grainy? That's not what packet loss results in. You should see stuttering and squares looking like jpeg artifacts on steroids of your hdmi cable is bad. Otherwise the problem exists elsewhere.
I bet they also used some low noise valves and Monster speaker cables to ensure the bulk signal (BS) stayed at an optimum level. This may have altered the Signal Height Information over Time (SHIT), and therefore impacted the Centre-weighted Reduced Audio Powerlevel (CRAP) causing a skewed result when doing their testing.
The sad thing is, things like this is why the wannabe electrical engineers think all high end audio is crap. It is a shame people pull crap this this... If it was up to Dave we would be making speakers out of used toilet paper and coat hangers though...
There is a distinct difference between people who actually do audio engineering and idiots. No one is saying make speakers out of toilet paper and no one is saying make speaker wire out of coat hangers, perhaps this is too complicated and goes right over your head.
Honestly I have yet to meet an electrical engineer that won't try to call most things in the high end audio world bullshit. The way Dave behaves and acts towards the subject implies he sees no relevance in the design quality with audio gear. Hence my toilet paper comment. Ironically you see the hypocrisy when we reviews high end test equipment and reference supplies. I could just as easily come up with some uninformed opinions on why a multimeter good to 8 1/2 digits is hyped up bullshit.
4:45 We have a saying over here at operations; "Unfortunately it works!" This can be said of the light switch that switches the neutral, the chainsaw cutting plasterboard, crane used as a winch motor, any other application tools or materials for which they were never intended....and, yep, this as well.
Dave, this is a natural step forward, companies are made by people and ran by them, depending on the people in the company, the company has a certain "personality", although it's not literally a personality, it's very similar, this is an emerging property; this is why we tend to treat companies as a person, not an entity. Many people behind the scenes that made those mentioned innovations happen either died, retired or left the company, this is why Sony today is what it is. a new generation tries to do more, on top of the work of the old generation. and as you might know from Sagan, a generation forward means different thinking, practically everything is different although built on top of the old generation.
murmaider2 Phones are ok but not what i'd call innovative - they aren't doing anything different/better than the other handful of smartphone manufacturers. Their TVs are built like shit.
TMM Maybe innovative is far-fetched but they do push the industry forward and at least they aren't afraid to come up with some stuff knowing there is a chance it will flop hard. Not to mention their components are used in so many things its crazy.
There's a lot of research Samsung is doing. They validated 40 nm DRAM chips (being a significant step towards DDR4 development), are improving chip manufacturing processes, coming up with a flash-optimized file system (F2FS), and other things like that.
Dave, you got something wrong on your board. This is a _low noise_ card. The burn-in is obviously done with John Cage's 4'33". Through quantum homoeopathic resonance, the imprint of that silence on the bits allows them to accurately reproduce a much wider range of binary digits (10b instead of the usual 2).
Here's what would really matter in a high-Q SD card: 1. Lower bit error rate. 2. Extra commands to read/write raw flash blocks for data recovery and optimized file systems. 3. Lower risk that random noise will put the card in one of the idiotic SD lockdown modes. 4. Longer data retention, e.g. 20 years. 5. Faster speed. 6. More R/W cycles. 7. Published alternative interface documentation so it can be used fully without signing the SD card association NDA (Which is impossible for Android and other open source OS coders to comply with) .
I had a portable digital camera in 1995 that had a removeable media card. It was an Epson. The card it used was Compact Flash. Also Casio came out with a portable digital camera in 1996.
I think the term " Blingphile " , as mentioned earlier by someone is the best term for people who pay crazy $$$$$$$ for anything . Keep up the good work Dave .
I think you should follow this video up with a quick explanation on digital vs analogue, data transmission (like QAM), differences in metal (like the truth about gold), and how shielding works. I am sure plenty of viewers would love to know about this stuff.
1:45 In 1982 some HP devices had sony 3.5" floppy drives and the floppy discs were Sony. The 3.5" sony floppy disc goes back to 1980 but the standard was in flux for many years . The first units for HP were single sided and with a lower number of tracks and tended to wear out quickly since the rpm was rather high compared to todays 3.5" floppy.
10 years ago a large big-box electronics chain, who I won't mention even though they just shut down 60+ stores in Canada, was all excited. They had just convinced Monster to wholesale them cables to use for fixtures! The company I was with contracted to do the installs, and in spite of warning them repeatedly that they were crap, we installed them. 2 months later we were contracted again, to remove the junk. And yet, people literally line up to buy hugely overpriced cabling. I buy my HDMI cables from the dollar store, $2 for 2M. Never had a problem.
Back in 2001 I was working in a small local custom computer retailer. It was the first time I ever ran into an Audiophool. The sales floor directed a customer to my service desk because they could not answer his question. We were at the time building our PCs with LG drives and the customer wanted to know if we could get a Plextor drive for a build if he decided to buy from us. I did him we could buy they typically added almost $100 to the cost of the PC. Asking further questions I discovered that he was under the impression a Palex would encode higher quality audio than another type of drive. I explained to him about how data on a CD was stored as 1s & 0s and while there were sometimes issues with older players only liking certain types of media that the encoding drive has 0 effect on the o quality - "You can't make a 1 more 1 than every other 1" I explained. It got to the point I'd me having him get a factory pressed CD from his car, ripping a few tracks digitally and doing an A/B comparison in his car. He still insisted that the factory one sounded better. At least he did end up buying a PC.... Paying the extra for the Plex /facepalm
Maybe they mean that when you read/write to the SD card, the EMF generated by the card is lower. By doing that, your DAC and the amplifier will see less noise in the power supply. I'm not saying that it is worth the extra money, I'm not an audifool, but it might produce a very small (not noticeable) change compared to a standard SD card.
Back in the early 80s, a couple of US audio magazines had the courage to do some tests that may have angered some of their advertisers. One test was to determine the audibility of various levels of distortion in response to the insane distortion level hype being foisted by audio equipment manufactures at the time. They took a very high end amp with the lowest distortion at the time and modified it to be able to easily A/B various levels of harmonic and intermodulation distortion. The room of selected "golden ears" test participants out of view of the amp couldn't hear harmonic distortion until it was in the full percent levels and couldn't hear IM distortion until it was at much higher levels than the cheapest name brand audio receivers/amps of the day. Another test was of speaker wire. High resistance speaker wire can over long runs negatively affect the damping factor of a speaker, but the BS was reaching major levels in the marketing of speaker cables just as it was with distortion in amps. The conclusion? For any typical consumer set-up with anything other than unusually long cable runs, 14 gauge lamp cord was just fine. Many other tests since then have confirmed this. If in doubt, use 12 gauge lamp cord. Some of the sarcastic questions about and reviews for some massively overpriced audiophile stuff on Amazon are absolutely hilarious: AudioQuest Diamond 16m (52.49 feet) Braided HDMI Cable $13,499.75 & FREE Shipping Solid Perfect-Surface Silver (PSS) Conductors Low Jitter, Low Distortion Audio Signal Conductors Controlled for Digital Audio Direction Dielectric-Bias System (DBS US Pat # 7,126,055) Significantly Improves Audio Performance Bi-Directional Ethernet Communication and Audio Return Channel Enabled www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IL3TZSQ/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_2?pf_rd_p=1944687702 AudioQuest Diamond 1m (3.2 feet) Braided HDMI Cable $1,094.75 & FREE Shipping www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003CT08E4/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_3?pf_rd_p=1944687702 AudioQuest NRG WEL Signature Series 6 Feet AC Power Cable $6,899.75 & FREE Shipping Solid PSS Silver 72V Dielectric-Bias System (DBS) Multiple-Position Noise-Dissipation System Counter-Spiral Geometry www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-NRG-WEL-Signature-Series/dp/B0055OM9WS
Surely this memory car rounds the zeros and points the Ones! If it was possible to have any benefit to sound quality it would be no better than the stream of data sent to it. I am guessing we wil, see sony audiophile cd technology soon.
Thank you for this video, Dave. I had the same reaction when I heard of this ridiculous claim. There's no way a digital memory card can offer better sound quality...
where is only thing that can be improved. Sound is managed by DMA with DAC, and when you set DMA to read data from card, you have very small delay, in range of nanoseconds if we compare with true audio. That can give distortions in sound spectrum if we compare it with true spectrum ( this comes from mathematics, you can't detect it on our own) So maybe this card can change address faster of your buffer, and you will get smaller delay, in range of nanoseconds ? I can't figure out anything other than that ...
What about read/write current pulses? SD cards can go up to 80 mA. I have seen a device where ADC and SD card were both powered from the same LDO, and writing to SD card caused audio “clicks”. While it was a design fault, is it possible that this SD card produces less noise on the power line, e. g. its current consumption changes slowly? This can be done with a capacitor, not sure if it's possible to fit a power filtering circuit into SD card.
When I read about that SD card I was waiting for Dave to throw shit at it, and first I thought he was gonna praise that POS for real. Confusion ensued. The second after I read the whiteboard and I was pleased. I love you Dave. Never change.
I haven't looked into this at all, but when I heard about it, I assumed what they were really selling wasn't "cleaner" digital bits. I assumed what they were selling was that the thing didn't have high power transients, which makes for a cleaner power rail. Yes, any good product will have split power rails for the digital part and the auto path, but just how many dB of isolation is there between them? Especially for portable electronics, I bet it isn't all that great. As an analogy, ECL and TTL are both digital parts, but one reason why ECL was faster than TTL was that it was constant current -- switching from 0 to 1 resulted in no net change in the current draw, so there was less noise on the power rail. Of course it was also faster because it used a lot more power too.
Hi Dave, that card does actually work and sound better than the low-quality versions by other manufacturers, but only when you use it with Sony's new high-definition audio files and on proper Sony equipment that can accept these cards. If you put one of these in a low quality player then they are obviously not going to improve anything. I tried them out at a Sony store and the difference is incredible. They give a wider dynamic range, for crisper highs, richer lows, and greater subtleties. Just read the packaging "Every single part, material, and feature has been crafted by Sony engineers to realise the ultimate High-Resolution Audio experience".
I love the implication this product makes that there is a digital storage medium somewhere that doesn't store your data perfectly. Digital media has ONE JOB and that's to keep your 1s and 0s exactly how you left them. ONE JOB
Sony is providing a valuable service here. There are wealthy audiophiles who NEED to spend money to have the reassurance that they've covered every possible variable for getting maximum sound quality. Using these cards will make them feel better, and the music will sound "better" as a result. I'm actually not sure if I'm being serious or not...
Now, of course, they could have designed the software of the walkman and premium sd card such that if you use an 'ordinary' SD card it adds noise and other imperfections...
The best way to save a ton of money on high end audio kit is to adress issues from the source. Go out with a 12G shotgun. Pull the eardefenders off your head and fire one shell into the ground. When you ears stop ringing then all your hifi problems are over. All audio will sound the same, you will never notice the difference and will have loads of spare money to spend on useful entertainment rather than audiophool items.
Hi Dave, I love this one, makes extremely good sense that a digital media that can hold all the ones and zeros where they should and ought to be, but I would love a revisit on this one since it is little or no facts to find on this subject, seems like people really think the quality of the sound is dependent on the noise from the chips would cause .quality problems when playing music from the memory card... have tried to explain that this is not the case, it depends on HW from the DA/AD converter and forth i.e. all the circuits that handle the analog signals till the sound hits the membrane in the speakers or headset, and have compared with all media that can hold digital information connected to a computer, HDD, Floppy, SD, CD/DVD/BD and have pointed out that they all have the same function regarding storing analog "information" digitally.... the buzz all circuits have and noise that comes with analog HW inside a computer case.... I have followed the videos investigating studio speakers and the "white" noise due to the same, or mostly the same as I understand it! Also, know that when you order components for sound equipment one can order(from some places) LowNoice and paired transistors and such to get the best (and low noise) out of what you built.... so as I said, a revisit and a bit deeper but simpler explanation would be appreciated, this is really something that is itching in my brain.... PLEASE :)
Sony also gave us the ATRAC codec to compress/mask/discard music data so it could fit on MiniDisc similar to mp3, so you can see when I heard about the price and marketing BS for what is essentially a WAV (type) player, I was much the same as Dave, however I do consider myself a fully paid up member of the Audiofool club.
The jokes: Paramount engineers developed the basic Trinitron technology which was sold at a bargain, and Marty's camcorder was a JVC. Inbetween they did make some great stuff, and they've always been great engineers.
Audiophool! I can't believe this is the first time I've heard the term, and I grew up in a family connected in one way or another with HiFi and Stereo for some 60 years. Brilliant! You can always sell BS to the uninformed audiophools. Oxygen-free copper cables is one that comes to mind. Another that I recall was a brick, neatly encased in a hardwood box, made of steel, or more likely, cast iron, that you placed atop your receiver or w/e and it somehow "cleaned up" the sound. Another Japanese invention, IIRC.
A technical correction: Sony was not the first portable solid state TV. The Philco Safari was in 1959. True, the Safari did use two small high voltage rectifier tubes but all the rest besides the picture tube was germanium transistors. Check out Bob Andersen's video: th-cam.com/video/zRCU6T8Twoo/w-d-xo.html or the web site: www.earlytelevision.org/philco_safari.html
When I saw the video thumbnail I thought that perhaps they were marketing the 64GB capacity as being able to hold higher quality/uncompressed audio files; Then they showed the graph.
Thanks Dave. I can't think of a better way to start this video than they way you did. It really demonstrates that this action from Sony's marketing team does not just insult the consumer, but also insults a history of great innovation from Sony. Sony, you stand on the shoulders of giants, and you chose to crap on them.
Yep, and those "waterproof" Xperia phones! Waterproof my ass! How can they market a phone as waterproof if it get's wet inside when you left it, sealed as the warranty requires, on the rain?
Eviltech That's more a fault with your phone than with their line of phones.
ivanjacob If it was with my phone than the warranty should have taken care of it! They refused to deem the damage warranty coverable without even touching the phone! By the way it has not been dropped or scratched at all!
Eviltech Yeah, their warranty on the phones isn't that great.
ivanjacob That's a bit of an understatement...
Ha! Sony deserves everything that you said. How far they have fallen!
(facepalm) :D
Sony jumped the shark in 2005, when they installed rootkits on millions of computers:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
Ben! Nice to see you here. Seems similar to the megapixel race... Its sad that such a big company will stoop to these lows to make a buck. Once that data passes through any type of digital process the amount of noise from an sd card is totally BOGUS. Low phase noise produced by a crystal oscillator for a DAC is important on the other hand. Love your vids Ben.
Mace Moneta
I read it, and then the original blog posts. How the heck did sony manage to get away with this? They literally made a virus and it was not even in the eula, like it would had to be
Mace Moneta In their defense, Dave's entire video is about their (consumer) electronics. The rootkit thing was their Music Entertainment branch. If you think that still taints the entire company from consumer electronics to medical imaging to financial services - well, that's one way to look at it.
Audiophools is right. I know a few of them myself. One guy paid 1,000 for a 1 meter HDMI cable that I broke when I was working at his house. I offered him a 5.00 replacement one and he just about had a stroke he was so upset. Was seeing artifacts on his TV that for the life of me I couldn't see at all, and I have perfect vision. Naturally he also had the #2 guage speaker wires, all laid out across his floor with stand offs, holding it 4" off the floor and keeping the conductors exactly 3" separated from each other, to take the audio from his 10 watt mono block tube amps to some ugly horn speakers that probably cost more than his house. Roof is covered in tarps, and he is driving a 40 year old car that has rust holes as big as baseballs, but inside there was an easy 200,000 in hifi and video gear. Audiophools and vidiots one in the same.
It's a relief to hear a voice of reason every once in a while :)
Bear in mind that Sony helped develop the original CD standard, which was based off of years of scientific research determining that 16 bit 44.1 kHz audio can sufficiently achieve the full potential of human hearing. They are currently directly contradicting that research and I'm pretty sure human hearing hasn't evolved in the last few decades. Besides 24 bit 192 kHz audio being completely unnecessary, people think that Sony has figured out how to produce purer ones and zeroes!
Ayyy Sony! Sit on it!
Afrotechmods Potsie!
You're right about this Dave, but Sony jumped the shark long ago with proprietary formats, buying music and film divisions and handing them over to total assholes who go around putting malware on CDs, paying bribes for airtime, and suing their customers. And many are pissed at the neutering the PS3's "alternate OS support" with a mandatory firmware update.
You mean 8gb of Sandisk memory stick at 40 dollars isn't better than 64gb of Sandisk sd card at 40 dollars?
The whole otherOS debacle is the entire reason why I refuse to buy anything Sony related and one of the reasons I got the Xbox one over the ps4. Some people might think it's a stupid reason but when you're damn near broke and your console could be used as a backup computer till you could get parts for repair, it was a godsend to have and to have that ability taken away from you when you paid for it to begin with is just a major piss off and a slap to the face.
TheOmegaRevolution
WTF? Looks like you have no knowledge of this story, bro. They made it ONLY to avoid additional charges, to sell PS3 as a "home computer", not entertainment system or tv/video/audio class of device.
John Freeman
I know a lot more about the story than I cared to put in that post buddy, sometimes it's just best to get to the point. Now I suggest you get the fuck over it and move on.
Memory cards for the PS Vita, oh lord...
Haha Dave gets so pissed off he throws the marker at himself! 5:03
Sergio Orjuela I can't actually find the marker now! It flew off my forehead somewhere...
EEVblog After having analysed the footage with my low noise Sony marker physics simulator it appeared to have bounced off the right side of your head, it flew 1.03 meter away from the whiteboard at a 7.34 degree angle to the right perpendicular facing away from the whiteboard. rotational analysis has shown it tumbled 2.7 times and landed on its back, kicking it more to the right and rolling for 0.5 meters on a hard carpet floor or until obstructed.
Headbutt dat pen!
EEVblog Look on your forehead...
EEVblog I think it might be lodged in your frontal lobe.
AOL! Oh, I mean - LOL! Classic Dave - I am sure that the virgin iridium hand bonded dies make those odd harmonic transients more reflective in the brain pan. And more mercury always means more better. Cheers!
lol I can't wait to go to the stores and listen to the sales pitches... that might be a lot of fun. lmao!
I didn't read what was written on the whiteboard until the very end, then I realized what it was haha!
Oh deary me! That shows the direction Sony are going. But can you blame them for jumping on the gullibility bandwagon?
It would be interesting to see (now a year later) how the sales figures for the "Audiofool" card have gone.
It's digital storage you either get your original file back that can be played or it's corrupted and unplayable.
In theory you could dump an MP3 onto a couple of floppies or even several cases of punched cards and it would not degrade so long as the media can be read.
Now what a higher quality card could do is handle more rewrites or be less likely to become corrupted etc.
That card is for your Walkman powered by your free energy generator while walking down your local solar sidewalk ;)
You forgot the "Premium Speakers" sold at your local super market out of a van!
"Mercury encapsulated symetrical parallel stacked noise averaging unobtanium doped die"
"Solid iridium bond wires hand bonded by nude virgins"
"1000hr burn-in with rick astley's 'never gonna give you up' or optional mc hammer 'u can't touch this' "
Welp, aussie humour never fails to deliver!
I'll have all of that to go, thank you.
adood101 I'd be afraid of bleed-thru of the Rick Astley one, causing unintentional RickRolling of the high end DAC, that can get expensive
How much better will my audio get if I load the audio files from the low noise SDXC card, into my NAS, then stream the music from the NAS, to my PC using the $10,000 ethernet cables, then play it over the DAC in a USB amp which is connected to the PC using the $6000 audiophile grade USB cables?
but your NIC and USB controller will degrade the signal! I bet you haven't even replaced your motherboard traces with pure silver or even canned your setup in a titanium-sealed box! HEATHEN. /s
Adam R Titanium? Pffft. 1mm gold plate or GTFO.
Adam R I do believe that was the point he was making. Using the best digital cabling money can buy, but the cheapest piece of crap USB DAC
Adam R I read this comment, and I was like "I don't remember typing that"
Hi there long lost twin.
when used with beats headphones and monster cables this is going to sound better than listening to the band playing live. LOL
it's like that $10K Ethernet cable I was reading about a couple weeks ago.
You have to be joking, was the cores made out of pure silver and was it 100m long?
It's a digital siginal!!!
***** It`s real! I actually saw it too. It is literaly ethernet cable for $10K
***** nope, just a fancy cable.
but I got an idea for something like this, paint a brick gold, I'm sure *someone* will buy it.
***** and it is about 12m long as I remember
***** Don't forget that even a digital signal is ultimately transferred in analog medium... so by making a really good cable you can decrease the noise and harness that characteristic to make longer cables, for example. (Of course the $10k Ethernet cable is still nonsense.)
This is by far my most favorite video.. hands down!
My morning so far:
Wake from Hibernation Mode.
Turn on computer.
See new EEVBlog
"Ah, good."
Read full title.
Short pause to recall WTH Sony's 'Audiophile' card is about. (I read about it a few days ago)
Sluggish neurons connect....
"OH!" "This is going to be brutal!"
Big smile!
Big sip of coffee.
Ah! Life just doesn't get any better. :D
THANKS, DAVE!!
I remember being told that gold CDs were supposed to sound better than silver ones. I knew right then and there that is was bullshit. It's 1's and 0's folks. You can't make a better 1 or a better 0. Oh, and monster cables.. What a joke. Audiofools, great term!
People. READ that whiteboard. It is taking an epic piss on "sales talk" :D
And yes, Sony jumped the shark on this one.
+Asbjørn Grandt Loved the "hand bonded by nude virgins" part. Brilliant.
Dave, you've made yet another great episode!!! Thanks for all the knowledge and laughs.
Will it make my mp3 player run Crysis?
Yeah, and it will find a cure for cancer.
The Regency TR-1 (1954) and Philco Safari (1959) were the world's first transistor radio and battery-powered portable TV, respectively. Maybe Sony had the first of those to be made in Japan, but not globally.
Thanks, you made my day.
Double facepalm doesn't even begin to cover it.
Reminds me of those so-called audiophiles who would tell you that gold-plated CDs sounded better than aluminium-plated ones. Or that you should spend $15.000 for a CD-player with only a digital output, not D/A converters.
As a friend pointed out, this level of technical sophistication is just not possible without a retro encabulator.
Audiophiles buy high end DAC's and invest in good design, high quality parts.
A true audiophile knows that a digital siginal is not prone to noise. It is 1 or 0
***** I agree with you, but the TRUE audiophile (one who simply appreciates decent music quality) has had the term stolen, much like Hi-Fi used to be 'High Fidelity", and then became "some pile of crap"...
A true audiophile will never use a digital system, you knob.
Everyone knows that Analog and tUbes is the only way to go.
timecop1080 please say that was trolling...
tubes distort sound (yes they degrade the quality), a true audiophile would want their music to sound exactly how the producer wanted it to sound for them not to make it sound how they want it to sound.
But they cost moreeee.
who cares how prone digital signals are to noise? we're talking about a card designed to have lower electromagnetic emissions for use in devices which (whether you're recording or playing back sound) require amplifying analog electrical signals.
Listen mate. I don't give a shit what you say, they work.
I bought 3 of these. One for my phone, one for my car, and one for my PC. It sounds AMAZING. The rich deep lows, the clean crisps highs. Worth every penny.
I even plugged one in to my cat, it's much lower noise now.
SCREW THE HATERS!!
They're talking about electrical noise caused by the flash memory. Obviously if your audio files stay in the digital domain all the way through, the storage medium can't affect how they sound, but if you're converting from digital to analogue for playback, or even worse, converting from analogue to digital during recording, then electrical noise from the flash card can definitely affect audio quality.
It may not be as earth-shattering as the Walkman, but electrically noisy flash memory is a real problem and if it works, this is a useful product. It would be really cool if you would do a video measuring the noise on an SD card bus to show just how severe it can be. You're one of the few people talking about this with the knowledge and equipment to objectively measure how bad most cards do and how better, if any, this card does.
Flash reading/writing noise can be heard on the audio output of some devices, so a low noise card would be useful there, and I'd expect it to be even more useful on flash-based recording devices, where the signal of interest is at a lower level.
Yeah, the ideal solution would be encasing the analog and digital parts of your circuit in separate machined aluminum cases and using decoupling caps the size of a soda can, but if that's not practical, or if you're just a user not a designer, swapping out for a lower noise flash card is a quick, easy improvement.
But as Dave said, if their product is really that sensitive to microvolt interference, then they don't deserve to call themselves electrical engineers. They can be assured that they are likely to face even greater levels of emi from external sources.
You might be underestimating just how much noise a flash card puts out. There's a charge pump to create the high programming voltage and large current pulses during page erases, they're really one of the most noisy components around today. Yes, any EE worth his salt should be able to design an audio circuit immune to that. But there's a lot of bad EEs out there, or good EEs building down to a price, and so *there are plenty of audio devices affected by electrical noise from the sd card out there* from a load of companies.
Really though, the only way to know for sure whether this is useful is to measure it. I wish Dave would get some actual data behind this one before going into rant mode. All it takes is one model of audio device that uses flash and doesn't have enough isolation for the upgrade this device (potentially) represents to be useful.
*****
That's true, but how many writes or page clears does the memory do while playing back music? None, they're all reads and this is sufficient to make it useless for 99.9999% of the public. If you need to record sound to such a high level of fidelity that sd card noise becomes a problem then you have to buy a better recording device, not a noiseless card. Anyway this card is clearly not intended for recording only since is publicized as "the perfect companion for the Walkman ZX2" (a 1.200$ mp3 player). His rant is perfectly spot on since Sony says "Buy this more expensive card, your music will sound better" and that's is simply not true! I bet almost every one who bought this memory found a difference while listening, but it's just a mix of placebo effect and cognitive dissonance so they don't have to face the fact that they paid 150$ for the something they could get for 30$.
***** So you actually say that this 5x priced memory card is for those who use cheap-ass badly designed equipment that are affected from the cards electrical noise?
Johnny Doe Badly designed doesn't always mean cheap. The improvement made by this card can be much cheaper than upgrading to a better designed piece of equipment.
Dave, I love your rants. I'm sure you have a plaque being made just for the EEVblog, at Sony...just for you. Great Rant and very very right!
Apple's been doing it for years.
I was thinking the same
yes, this is iTunes business model. The sound quality is literally worse than a 30 year old CD. Pretty sure all the record labels were laughing like drains at Steve Jobs... until he started selling more than them.
*****
*Laughs at typical ignorant hipster douchebag.*
*****
*iPod* = DAP (Digital Audio Player). Invented by British scientist Kane Kramer in 1979 and the first commercial DAP was the AT&T FlashPAC in 1998.
*iPhone* = Smartphone. First ever touch-screen smartphone was the IBM Simon Personal Communicator in 1994.
*Macbook Air* = Subnotebook. First released by Compaq in 1990 as the Compaq LTE.
*iPad* = Tablet Computer. in September 1989, GRiD Systems release the first commercially available tablet-type portable computer, the GRiDPad.
So no, Apple did not develop any of those technologies. They simply slapped an Apple logo on technologies that were already in the market, jacked up the prices and sold them to rich socialites and cafe-latte sipping hipsters.
***** maybe you need to look up "innovation" before directing others to wiki.
Haha this made me laugh really hard, thank you for that! I was really wondering where this video was going to and I had no idea what was to come. Being quite a fan of Sony myself and knowing about their innovations in the broadcast industry, I was really doubtful about the concept of an Audiophile SD card. But thank god you saved it in the end! Doing lots of sound design, and audio engineering myself this product looks completely bogus to me, being it that everything is stored in bits and bytes on every memory card the same anyways. It really pretty much the same type of scam as with those super expensive HDMI cables, which is just a digital signal that either works, or it doesn't, there is no in between. I honestly feel sorry for the people that buy into sort of crap, they could have spend their money on so many other things that would have actually mattered a big deal quality wise like: a good pair of headphones or speakers, a good interface, a good audio player, lossless music, or just a few extra bucks to spend on that display you wanted that you would have spend otherwise on this super expensive HDMI cable. Thanks for debunking this! Such a shame audiophiles are such an easy and gullible target, mostly because of the huge cloud of misinformation and false marketing schemes out there. Thanks for putting a stop to that!
I think that is the first time Dave bleeped a swear word.
The man is pure genius, and this is a great rant. I hate wanker products like this. And it is totally sad where SONY has gone in the last ten years.
Dave, I apologize in advance for being pedantic. :)
The professional "Beta" was called Betacam, released in the early 1980's. About the only thing shared was the cassette shell. Recording format, tape speed were all different. Betamax is a composite "Color-Under" format, Betacam was a component format with separate tracks for luminance and chroma.
First transistor pocket radio was the Regency TR-1 (1954), built in my home town of Indianapolis.
Those marketing guys have been breathing too much Copper free Oxygen!
Dave. Dave. This is amazing. The best video I have ever seen on TH-cam.
The insane fringe of audiphiles who go for stuff like this will stop and nothing to prove they know something engineers don't, and that the rest of us just don't get it. It's like the worst parts of tinfoil hat conspiracy theory logic used to justify $1000 cables and 5x cost SDHC cards. Stupidity bugs me, but sometimes you have to just let it go and tell them to go be stupid somewhere else.
There are similar debates among analog synthesizer enthusiasts who insist that through-hole construction has an inherently "warmer" sound than surface mount. I've even seen small-time manufacturers trying to play on this.
"low noise SD card" if the ad is true it's insane.
Olivier Dahan www.theverge.com/2015/2/19/8068465/sony-memory-card-premium-sound-sr-64hxa
Pete Brown .. so... insane.
Well, some people are buying iPhone, why not "low noise" memory card ! :-)
"After 60 years of technical innovation, the marketing wankers have well and truly infiltrated Sony" LOL.
This product announcement really made me roll my eyes too a low noise memory card...when no doubt every track played is stored in RAM anyway. Yes Sony you win a prize, the booby prize.
almost as stupid as premium 2M HDMI cables listed here for $1K. its all Fucking digital. you either get a signal/picture, or you don't! the only exception is attenuation over distance, in which you will get packet loss and eventually no signal at all! complete pisstake
Well... I agree that a $1K HDMI Cable is moon priced. But: Just because it is digital. does not mean that the cheapest of the cheapest cable from alibaba can't cause problem like lost packets or jitter that are visible in the picture. Or when on the construction side some idiot places heavy material on top of an Ethernet cable spool, this can fuck up the signal integrity do the point of working marginally (which can be more annoying then when it is clearly defective). As engineers we should be careful with statements like "it is digital, so the cable does not matter" as there are the cheapest of the cheapest cables that kind of work, but not full fill their spec.
sarowie WE? Are you an engineer? When people say "it is digital, so the cable doesn't matter" that is said on the assumption that the cable meets the specifications required to call it (enter whatever digital cable here). So in that sense, as long as it meets the bare minimum requirements and is within specs, it doesn't matter if it has silver, gold or is encrusted with diamonds, 0s and 1s are 0s and 1s. Sure if the cable is garbage and doesn't meet the specifications set forth it may have issues. But let me end with this, I have 8 dollar HDMI cables that perform the same as any shit Monster has on the market and that is the point.
John Doe thank fuck, somebody with logic here ive been using $10 HDMI cables that meet the HDMI 1.3/1.4 spec for ages and ive never had any issues
sarowie I ordered the cheapest hdmi cable I could find on amazon to use for my Playstation 3, picture was grainy as hell and couldn't go to the highest resolutions without getting more and more grainy.
Bought a slightly higher priced cable (20$ or so, nothing moon priced), and guess what, no noise, no grain, highest resolutions! So you are right, the price may make a difference between ultra cheap and medium priced. But I don't think the difference between medium priced and "boutique" priced are that amazing.
***** Grainy? That's not what packet loss results in. You should see stuttering and squares looking like jpeg artifacts on steroids of your hdmi cable is bad. Otherwise the problem exists elsewhere.
I bet they also used some low noise valves and Monster speaker cables to ensure the bulk signal (BS) stayed at an optimum level. This may have altered the Signal Height Information over Time (SHIT), and therefore impacted the Centre-weighted Reduced Audio Powerlevel (CRAP) causing a skewed result when doing their testing.
The sad thing is, things like this is why the wannabe electrical engineers think all high end audio is crap. It is a shame people pull crap this this... If it was up to Dave we would be making speakers out of used toilet paper and coat hangers though...
There is a distinct difference between people who actually do audio engineering and idiots. No one is saying make speakers out of toilet paper and no one is saying make speaker wire out of coat hangers, perhaps this is too complicated and goes right over your head.
Coat hangers would work fine
Honestly I have yet to meet an electrical engineer that won't try to call most things in the high end audio world bullshit. The way Dave behaves and acts towards the subject implies he sees no relevance in the design quality with audio gear. Hence my toilet paper comment. Ironically you see the hypocrisy when we reviews high end test equipment and reference supplies. I could just as easily come up with some uninformed opinions on why a multimeter good to 8 1/2 digits is hyped up bullshit.
Well its simple, most high end audio stuff is bullshit, like power cables effecting sound, or "ground amplifiers" in amplifier design, yeah bullshit.
lyokofans Noise is only a factor in the analogue domain not the digital
4:45 We have a saying over here at operations; "Unfortunately it works!" This can be said of the light switch that switches the neutral, the chainsaw cutting plasterboard, crane used as a winch motor, any other application tools or materials for which they were never intended....and, yep, this as well.
I was hoping SONY will never do that kind of bullshit.
Dave, this is a natural step forward, companies are made by people and ran by them, depending on the people in the company, the company has a certain "personality", although it's not literally a personality, it's very similar, this is an emerging property; this is why we tend to treat companies as a person, not an entity. Many people behind the scenes that made those mentioned innovations happen either died, retired or left the company, this is why Sony today is what it is. a new generation tries to do more, on top of the work of the old generation. and as you might know from Sagan, a generation forward means different thinking, practically everything is different although built on top of the old generation.
Samsung is these days the company that drives electronics forward the same way Sony did in the old times.
What notable innovations has Samsung made in the past 10 years? They aren't a very notable company imo, just high volume production.
TMM
have you seen their TVs and smartphones recently bruh?
murmaider2 Phones are ok but not what i'd call innovative - they aren't doing anything different/better than the other handful of smartphone manufacturers. Their TVs are built like shit.
TMM Maybe innovative is far-fetched but they do push the industry forward and at least they aren't afraid to come up with some stuff knowing there is a chance it will flop hard. Not to mention their components are used in so many things its crazy.
There's a lot of research Samsung is doing. They validated 40 nm DRAM chips (being a significant step towards DDR4 development), are improving chip manufacturing processes, coming up with a flash-optimized file system (F2FS), and other things like that.
Dave, you got something wrong on your board. This is a _low noise_ card. The burn-in is obviously done with John Cage's 4'33". Through quantum homoeopathic resonance, the imprint of that silence on the bits allows them to accurately reproduce a much wider range of binary digits (10b instead of the usual 2).
For a minute, I thought you were gonna show how good it works 😲
Here's what would really matter in a high-Q SD card: 1. Lower bit error rate. 2. Extra commands to read/write raw flash blocks for data recovery and optimized file systems. 3. Lower risk that random noise will put the card in one of the idiotic SD lockdown modes. 4. Longer data retention, e.g. 20 years. 5. Faster speed. 6. More R/W cycles. 7. Published alternative interface documentation so it can be used fully without signing the SD card association NDA (Which is impossible for Android and other open source OS coders to comply with) .
I just bought five. Can't wait to watch the video!
On the side of it all, what about a video on circuits producing unintended audible noise and how to avoid that?
I had a portable digital camera in 1995 that had a removeable media card. It was an Epson. The card it used was Compact Flash. Also Casio came out with a portable digital camera in 1996.
Excellent video dave! Precisely my reaction when I saw this title. Love the whiteboard technical stuff lol
I was waiting for this one so badly!
A fair and balanced appraisal of this amazing new technology. :)
@Dr_Kachu san I heard Saturn was designed as a 2D machine. Some of the CPUs are just things like 68000s for the sound.
EPIC VIDEO! keep going this way Dave! you're the best of youtube
I think the term " Blingphile " , as mentioned earlier by someone is the best term for people who pay crazy $$$$$$$ for anything . Keep up the good work Dave .
I think you should follow this video up with a quick explanation on digital vs analogue, data transmission (like QAM), differences in metal (like the truth about gold), and how shielding works.
I am sure plenty of viewers would love to know about this stuff.
Ooh, I saw the tweet about this topic a few days ago, have been looking forward to the video since.
1:45 In 1982 some HP devices had sony 3.5" floppy drives and the floppy discs were Sony. The 3.5" sony floppy disc goes back to 1980 but the standard was in flux for many years . The first units for HP were single sided and with a lower number of tracks and tended to wear out quickly since the rpm was rather high compared to todays 3.5" floppy.
10 years ago a large big-box electronics chain, who I won't mention even though they just shut down 60+ stores in Canada, was all excited. They had just convinced Monster to wholesale them cables to use for fixtures!
The company I was with contracted to do the installs, and in spite of warning them repeatedly that they were crap, we installed them.
2 months later we were contracted again, to remove the junk.
And yet, people literally line up to buy hugely overpriced cabling.
I buy my HDMI cables from the dollar store, $2 for 2M. Never had a problem.
I have seen advertised here in the UK £11000 for speaker cable with a fancy insulation to give it that special high quality audio file look.
my favorite audiofool gibberish is when people review toslink cables and describe the difference in sound from flipping the direction of the cable.
I listened to this video copied to my low noise sd card and found the audio quality massively improved :D
then burnt it to dvd, watched it, and used the dvd rewinder on it.
As an audiophile I'd also suggest SCSI drives which have a warmer sound than IDE / SATA ones.
Back in 2001 I was working in a small local custom computer retailer. It was the first time I ever ran into an Audiophool. The sales floor directed a customer to my service desk because they could not answer his question. We were at the time building our PCs with LG drives and the customer wanted to know if we could get a Plextor drive for a build if he decided to buy from us. I did him we could buy they typically added almost $100 to the cost of the PC. Asking further questions I discovered that he was under the impression a Palex would encode higher quality audio than another type of drive. I explained to him about how data on a CD was stored as 1s & 0s and while there were sometimes issues with older players only liking certain types of media that the encoding drive has 0 effect on the o quality - "You can't make a 1 more 1 than every other 1" I explained.
It got to the point I'd me having him get a factory pressed CD from his car, ripping a few tracks digitally and doing an A/B comparison in his car.
He still insisted that the factory one sounded better. At least he did end up buying a PC.... Paying the extra for the Plex
/facepalm
Maybe they mean that when you read/write to the SD card, the EMF generated by the card is lower. By doing that, your DAC and the amplifier will see less noise in the power supply.
I'm not saying that it is worth the extra money, I'm not an audifool, but it might produce a very small (not noticeable) change compared to a standard SD card.
I think they are probably sing turbo-encabulator technology, making use of a drawn reciprocation dingle-arm, to reduce sinusoidal deplanaration.
I cant tell you how good that was. Best thing I've seen since Sony invented the 6 slice toaster.
Back in the early 80s, a couple of US audio magazines had the courage to do some tests that may have angered some of their advertisers.
One test was to determine the audibility of various levels of distortion in response to the insane distortion level hype being foisted by audio equipment manufactures at the time. They took a very high end amp with the lowest distortion at the time and modified it to be able to easily A/B various levels of harmonic and intermodulation distortion. The room of selected "golden ears" test participants out of view of the amp couldn't hear harmonic distortion until it was in the full percent levels and couldn't hear IM distortion until it was at much higher levels than the cheapest name brand audio receivers/amps of the day.
Another test was of speaker wire. High resistance speaker wire can over long runs negatively affect the damping factor of a speaker, but the BS was reaching major levels in the marketing of speaker cables just as it was with distortion in amps. The conclusion? For any typical consumer set-up with anything other than unusually long cable runs, 14 gauge lamp cord was just fine. Many other tests since then have confirmed this. If in doubt, use 12 gauge lamp cord.
Some of the sarcastic questions about and reviews for some massively overpriced audiophile stuff on Amazon are absolutely hilarious:
AudioQuest Diamond 16m (52.49 feet) Braided HDMI Cable
$13,499.75 & FREE Shipping
Solid Perfect-Surface Silver (PSS) Conductors
Low Jitter, Low Distortion Audio
Signal Conductors Controlled for Digital Audio Direction
Dielectric-Bias System (DBS US Pat # 7,126,055) Significantly Improves Audio Performance
Bi-Directional Ethernet Communication and Audio Return Channel Enabled
www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IL3TZSQ/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_2?pf_rd_p=1944687702
AudioQuest Diamond 1m (3.2 feet) Braided HDMI Cable
$1,094.75 & FREE Shipping
www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003CT08E4/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_3?pf_rd_p=1944687702
AudioQuest NRG WEL Signature Series 6 Feet AC Power Cable
$6,899.75 & FREE Shipping
Solid PSS Silver
72V Dielectric-Bias System (DBS)
Multiple-Position Noise-Dissipation System
Counter-Spiral Geometry
www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-NRG-WEL-Signature-Series/dp/B0055OM9WS
Surely this memory car rounds the zeros and points the Ones!
If it was possible to have any benefit to sound quality it would be no better than the stream of data sent to it. I am guessing we wil, see sony audiophile cd technology soon.
I hear it can also give you higher resolution on your digital camera.
Thank you for this video, Dave. I had the same reaction when I heard of this ridiculous claim. There's no way a digital memory card can offer better sound quality...
where is only thing that can be improved. Sound is managed by DMA with DAC, and when you set DMA to read data from card, you have very small delay, in range of nanoseconds if we compare with true audio. That can give distortions in sound spectrum if we compare it with true spectrum ( this comes from mathematics, you can't detect it on our own)
So maybe this card can change address faster of your buffer, and you will get smaller delay, in range of nanoseconds ?
I can't figure out anything other than that ...
What about read/write current pulses? SD cards can go up to 80 mA. I have seen a device where ADC and SD card were both powered from the same LDO, and writing to SD card caused audio “clicks”. While it was a design fault, is it possible that this SD card produces less noise on the power line, e. g. its current consumption changes slowly? This can be done with a capacitor, not sure if it's possible to fit a power filtering circuit into SD card.
WAY TO GO, DAVE! That was great!
When I read about that SD card I was waiting for Dave to throw shit at it, and first I thought he was gonna praise that POS for real. Confusion ensued. The second after I read the whiteboard and I was pleased. I love you Dave. Never change.
I saw an interview with the three men who conceived and created the CCD camera, it took them 5 minutes. They made a lot for 5 minutes work.
Never underestimate the power of PLACEBO, good job FONY!
The intro had me worried you were going to come out and support them... then I read the whiteboard LOL!!!!!!
I haven't looked into this at all, but when I heard about it, I assumed what they were really selling wasn't "cleaner" digital bits. I assumed what they were selling was that the thing didn't have high power transients, which makes for a cleaner power rail. Yes, any good product will have split power rails for the digital part and the auto path, but just how many dB of isolation is there between them? Especially for portable electronics, I bet it isn't all that great.
As an analogy, ECL and TTL are both digital parts, but one reason why ECL was faster than TTL was that it was constant current -- switching from 0 to 1 resulted in no net change in the current draw, so there was less noise on the power rail. Of course it was also faster because it used a lot more power too.
Hi Dave, that card does actually work and sound better than the low-quality versions by other manufacturers, but only when you use it with Sony's new high-definition audio files and on proper Sony equipment that can accept these cards. If you put one of these in a low quality player then they are obviously not going to improve anything. I tried them out at a Sony store and the difference is incredible. They give a wider dynamic range, for crisper highs, richer lows, and greater subtleties. Just read the packaging "Every single part, material, and feature has been crafted by Sony engineers to realise the ultimate High-Resolution Audio experience".
I love the implication this product makes that there is a digital storage medium somewhere that doesn't store your data perfectly. Digital media has ONE JOB and that's to keep your 1s and 0s exactly how you left them. ONE JOB
Sony is providing a valuable service here. There are wealthy audiophiles who NEED to spend money to have the reassurance that they've covered every possible variable for getting maximum sound quality. Using these cards will make them feel better, and the music will sound "better" as a result.
I'm actually not sure if I'm being serious or not...
They didn`t... did they? I haven`t even watched the video but I already know I`m up for a treat.
Wait, let me see, I have three Sony microSD cards: SR-64UY2, SR-64UX, and SR-G1UY. It's any of those the "Low Noise" one?
So...... will this noise reduction make the pictures and video I store on the card clearer too???
Now, of course, they could have designed the software of the walkman and premium sd card such that if you use an 'ordinary' SD card it adds noise and other imperfections...
The best way to save a ton of money on high end audio kit is to adress issues from the source. Go out with a 12G shotgun. Pull the eardefenders off your head and fire one shell into the ground. When you ears stop ringing then all your hifi problems are over.
All audio will sound the same, you will never notice the difference and will have loads of spare money to spend on useful entertainment rather than audiophool items.
Gotta get them 900€ Power cables though
Hi Dave, I love this one, makes extremely good sense that a digital media that can hold all the ones and zeros where they should and ought to be, but I would love a revisit on this one since it is little or no facts to find on this subject, seems like people really think the quality of the sound is dependent on the noise from the chips would cause .quality problems when playing music from the memory card... have tried to explain that this is not the case, it depends on HW from the DA/AD converter and forth i.e. all the circuits that handle the analog signals till the sound hits the membrane in the speakers or headset, and have compared with all media that can hold digital information connected to a computer, HDD, Floppy, SD, CD/DVD/BD and have pointed out that they all have the same function regarding storing analog "information" digitally.... the buzz all circuits have and noise that comes with analog HW inside a computer case.... I have followed the videos investigating studio speakers and the "white" noise due to the same, or mostly the same as I understand it! Also, know that when you order components for sound equipment one can order(from some places) LowNoice and paired transistors and such to get the best (and low noise) out of what you built.... so as I said, a revisit and a bit deeper but simpler explanation would be appreciated, this is really something that is itching in my brain.... PLEASE :)
Sony also gave us the ATRAC codec to compress/mask/discard music data so it could fit on MiniDisc similar to mp3, so you can see when I heard about the price and marketing BS for what is essentially a WAV (type) player, I was much the same as Dave, however I do consider myself a fully paid up member of the Audiofool club.
The jokes: Paramount engineers developed the basic Trinitron technology which was sold at a bargain, and Marty's camcorder was a JVC. Inbetween they did make some great stuff, and they've always been great engineers.
How about gold plated, electrically screened optical TOSlink cables.
Audiophool! I can't believe this is the first time I've heard the term, and I grew up in a family connected in one way or another with HiFi and Stereo for some 60 years. Brilliant!
You can always sell BS to the uninformed audiophools. Oxygen-free copper cables is one that comes to mind. Another that I recall was a brick, neatly encased in a hardwood box, made of steel, or more likely, cast iron, that you placed atop your receiver or w/e and it somehow "cleaned up" the sound. Another Japanese invention, IIRC.
4:15 you know shit hit the fan when Dave does the double face palm
A technical correction: Sony was not the first portable solid state TV. The Philco Safari was in 1959. True, the Safari did use two small high voltage rectifier tubes but all the rest besides the picture tube was germanium transistors. Check out Bob Andersen's video: th-cam.com/video/zRCU6T8Twoo/w-d-xo.html or the web site: www.earlytelevision.org/philco_safari.html
I don't know f a about electrical engineering, but I love this guy. Very entertaining.
The Regency TR-1 was the first commercially manufactured transistor radio in 1954.
That was a nice explanation on the whiteboard
When I saw the video thumbnail I thought that perhaps they were marketing the 64GB capacity as being able to hold higher quality/uncompressed audio files; Then they showed the graph.