TonyStarks
100+ Head-Fier
The distortion on the extreme pro is just a no no for me.. Was on extreme pro, there is no looking back after I got the Edge and Micron... Might get the swissbit to try out later... But I would think between Edge and Micron... It a matter of taste for individuals....With the new swissbit 256gb industrial card inside, I felt that my fully aged WM1AM2 balance port no longer has any unnatural grain or distortion to the sound at all.
Cymbal strikes feels extremely sharp and clean without any hint of the tizzy distortion at the tip of the transient that I heard on the SanDisk extreme pro.
So I would really recommend for Walkman users who are interested in seeking improvement to the sound quality of Walkman to consider using industrial cards if budget allows.
Currently there are a few cards for you to choose from basing on your budget and storage requirements:
Micron I300, up to 1TB, QLC cells
SanDisk Edge up to 400GB, 3D TLC cells
Swissbit S-55U, up to 256GB, 3D TLC cells
QLC cards will be much cheaper interms of cost per GB. Their downside is higher cell error rates, a lower write endurance and lower write speeds as compared to 3D TLC.
But for the purposes of Walkman read heavy music playback, QLC with stronger LDPC error correction will do just fine. Even taking to account of streaming apps, we don’t really write much data to the QLC microSD that will cause it to fail prematurely.
Currently we don’t have any one who have own all three cards to give a comparison to know which card sound better. But I believe all these three industrial cards will be so much better than any of the consumer microSD cards out there.