[seanwee]

Thanks. This is actually what I've searched for because I have to choose between 1 Terabyte Integral, Sandisk Extreme and Extreme Pro. Now I see why the Extreme Pro is like 200 bucks more expensive. lol.



I remember Sony wanted to release a audiophile SD Card for "premium sound": https://www.whathifi.com/news/sony-claims-high-end-sd-card-offers-premium-sound

The explanation how this works basicly is what we are talking about here.

You're welcome. Your mileage may vary though depending on your source. But on my DX160 there was no discernable difference between the sandisk Ultra, Extreme or Extreme Pro.

Logically speaking there shouldn't be any differences anyway since audio files are never directly read from the SD card, its buffered in the ram of your source then passed through the DAC. And then the DAC has its own noise filtering built in.

Also regardless of how good the Sony audiophile SD card claims to be, theres no way its price is justified. You may as well buy a better source at that price.

Edit: It was brought up sometime in the Sony thread that mSD power draw may also be an alternate way it could potentially affect the sound quality since the whole device shares power planes.

That could explain why manufacturers like iBasso are switching to dual battery systems that have independent batteries for the mainboard and DAC/Amp section.

 

[darkarth]

You're welcome. Your mileage may vary though depending on your source. But on my DX160 there was no discernable difference between the sandisk Ultra, Extreme or Extreme Pro.

Yeah I know. As @manueljenkin mentioned, there are many things that effects it. But there is a bunch of people that agrees that extreme pro is the best and had some technical explanations for this. So I guess there is some truth behind.

I won't find out myself anyway. In this case my buying behavior is more based on trust in the community and statistical tendencies of experiences to prevend me from experiencing the worse sound, since price isn't the big thing for me. And I like bass and warm sound. So I guess I can't do anything wrong with the extreme pro.

Also regardless of how good the Sony audiophile SD card claims to be, theres no way its price is justified. You may as well buy a better source at that price.

I never thought about buying this card because 64 GB is just a joke. And without any testing I don't even know if it's better or not. I only found it interesting that, so many people of the community were laughing at this and said this is just bad advertisment (at least in my country). But with all the tests on the sony walkman nw-zx500 it seems like this is a proof that the industry know about that and it's not just a placebo-effect.

 

[manueljenkin]

There are many ways these could happen.

There are manifestations through the ground and power lines due to the variation in power draw, thus passing on the noise to the analog section.

But there's also the fact that every digital access is a fast switching pulse and all such fast switching pulses have noticeable noise profile associated with them. Regardless of whether you buffer or not this noise can seep through. You can try to use optical coupling but it's not as much a fairytale fix as assumed. The optocoupler will have its own backend that will have its own noise profile. Emi is a complex phenomenon and very very hard to clear off once something spurious is prone to be generated (most of our understanding is just abstractions of it).

The storage format type etc affect things by the total number of access and noise per each access so it becomes a different spectral distribution for each configuration. And it'll be specific to the system properties which one of them would be the most optimal. But even the conditions in which the controllers write the data to the card/memory even in a computer, manifest in sound changes (atleast in my system and a few of my friends systems). I've described it here:

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/my-experience-with-different-music-players.923248/post-16362423

Regarding the sony sd card it is likely to do with how the card itself is fabricated, it's binning, phy layer etc, and of course power controllers, power consumption profiles and internal regulators, power design. It likely won't do fast access speeds (all choices come with a compromise) but that's not what it's advertised for anyway.

If I were to try and do a sd card playback I'll take some SLC card, format it in a clean way (also defragment), load music, and sequentially access through SPI mode (of course with buffers). I think this unit works in a similar way : http://www.tachyon.co.jp/~sichoya/SDTrans/SDTrans6.html

I would be interested to see options with SDIO mode as well (likely better if done well) but it's so proprietary that I don't know how one could go with a solution with a ground up approach to optimize for audio (unless you're a big company who could make volume sales and have return on investment for the r&d involved).

 

[manueljenkin]

Speaking of EMI, I came across a few lectures (I'm currently watching them)







High speed optocouplers and wireless systems are very complicated (and mostly the techniques are very propereitary). Bear in mind these are areas where even experienced designers can make mistakes of working under super idealistic fairy tale approximation.

 

[darkarth]

Good god.... why the heck is customer service so bad today that it feels like it's on purpose.

I trieed out the SD Association formatter. And recognized that I can't choose the allocation unit size. So I asked the support which size is preselected by the software.

And the answer literally was:

The SD Formatter does not give an option to select the File System (FAT32 or exFAT):

cards 64GB and above, the file system is automatically taken as exFAT
cards 32GB and below, the file system is automatically taken as FAT32

Please let us know if we can further assist.


Well, you don't say... but this hasn't even anything to do with my question.

I mean you can experience that kinda stuff everywhere today. But that completely ruins every reputation if they don't even understand the easiest question.

 

[seanwee]

Good god.... why the heck is customer service so bad today that it feels like it's on purpose.

I trieed out the SD Association formatter. And recognized that I can't choose the allocation unit size. So I asked the support which size is preselected by the software.

And the answer literally was:

The SD Formatter does not give an option to select the File System (FAT32 or exFAT):

cards 64GB and above, the file system is automatically taken as exFAT
cards 32GB and below, the file system is automatically taken as FAT32

Please let us know if we can further assist.


Well, you don't say... but this hasn't even anything to do with my question.

I mean you can experience that kinda stuff everywhere today. But that completely ruins every reputation if they don't even understand the easiest question.

It uses default everything

 

[manueljenkin]

I understand your frustration, but I would also like you to know that sometimes customer service from companies might be more geared towards generic requests/doubts (I don't know if this is the case with SD association, just mentioning in general). We are at a deeper end of configurations/customizations so it may be unfamiliar to them. Anyway, after formatting I believe your should be able to check the file system and its attributes.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions...cation-unit-size-of-a-ntfs-partition-in-vista (make sure you run cmd as administrator, sometimes certain features will be blocked for non administrator users)

 

[The1Signature]

I just bought SanDisk Extreme Pro microSD Card with 1TB (170MB).

After reading this forum, I am actually confused which formatting I should do .

Does anybody have the same microSD card?

 

[darkarth]

I just bought SanDisk Extreme Pro microSD Card with 1TB (170MB).

After reading this forum, I am actually confused which formatting I should do .

Does anybody have the same microSD card?

You should use the official SD Card Formatter.

You can download it here: https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/sd-memory-card-formatter-for-windows-download/ Scroll down and click on Accept. It's free.

 

[The1Signature]

I should have specified my question: The questions concern the file system and cluster size

 

[darkarth]

I should have specified my question: The questions concern the file system and cluster size

You can't choose that if you use this tool.

 

[The1Signature]

This still does not answer the question of which file system + cluster size is the optimum for DAPs / Hi-Res music? forget the program, one can do the formatting via windows explorer, too.

 

[darkarth]

This still does not answer the question of which file system + cluster size is the optimum for DAPs / Hi-Res music? forget the program, one can do the formatting via windows explorer, too.

But it doesn't have the same effect on the sound. This tool was made for the optimal format and includes things that windows don't.

 

[The1Signature]

ok, i got it. i will use it then.

you wrote: cards 64GB and above, the file system is automatically taken as exFAT

got it.

but what about the cluster size, then? what is the default cluster size this program applies? can you check your system and tell me?

 

[The1Signature]

So, 1 TB with exfat nd 120kb cluster size, finally