Ultimate Sony Android Walkman Sound tuning and DSP guide

[Sonywalkmanuser]

As per moderator suggestion, this thread is created so as to allow for deeper discussion of how to improve or tune the sound of the Walkman to the most extreme. Please bide by the posting guidelines of headfi forums and keep discussion with maturity and decorum. Technical, modding discussion and subjective opinions on various accessories and aftermarket products are welcomed too.

Content warning regarding the pdf: it will contain unproven, unscientific or even subjective snake oil information, proceed at your own discretion. Any liability or damages to your mental wellbeing or equipment would not be entertained.

Refer to the attached pdf file for the guide. The guide is written for the WM1AM2 and WM1ZM2 in mind but many parts of the guide would still apply to ZX507, A105, A306, ZX707 and other regional models that have the modern android OS.

Please post any questions or suggestions for the guide in this thread and not on the other Walkman threads.

 

[stapani]

Thanks, I have ZX707 so very useful pdf for me!

 

[concombre]

Thanks! This is really useful!

 

[jjss]

As per moderator suggestion, this thread is created so as to allow for deeper discussion of how to improve or tune the sound of the Walkman to the most extreme. Please bide by the posting guidelines of headfi forums and keep discussion with maturity and decorum. Technical, modding discussion and subjective opinions on various accessories and aftermarket products are welcomed too.

Content warning regarding the pdf: it will contain unproven, unscientific or even subjective snake oil information, proceed at your own discretion. Any liability or damages to your mental wellbeing or equipment would not be entertained.

Refer to the attached pdf file for the guide. The guide is written for the WM1AM2 and WM1ZM2 in mind but many parts of the guide would still apply to ZX507, A105, A305, ZX707 and other regional models that have the modern android OS.

Please post any questions or suggestions for the guide in this thread and not on the other Walkman threads.

@Sonywalkmanuser
Thanks for your effort, this is very useful!
Cheers

 

[Sonywalkmanuser]

Just a heads up on topics covered in the next revision of the guide:

Proper Battery charging and calibration tips.
USB Charger recommendations.
Recommended steps to perform after each firmware update so as to reduce/prevent any programming bugs/errors/glitches.
More photos/screenshots/diagrams to further elaborate the guide
Grammar/spelling touch ups.
Alternative music player app choices.

 

[concombre]

Would love to know your opinion about other players and is it's worth the investment.
Thank you so much for making our life easier .

 

[Sonywalkmanuser]

Version 1.2 has been updated on first post. Please redownload the pdf file for updated copy.
Added more screenshots for better elaboration/clarity.

 

[Sonywalkmanuser]

Version 1.3 has been updated on first post. Please redownload the pdf file for updated copy.
Added Battery charging, battery calibration and USB charging information(last pages of the guide)

 

[Sonywalkmanuser]

Sound impressions of the Samsung Pro Ultimate 256GB microsd card:

The Samsung Pro Ultimate is certainly an excellent sounding card for the WM1AM2, especially after using deoxit gold to clean the gold contacts.

This card has great frequency balance and great musicalities(bass depth, dynamics and resolution). Excellent black background feel, there is no sense of any haziness(especially after deoxit). In my opinion, the Samsung is the best sounding commercially available(easy to find) card I have heard so far, providing a blacker background than the SanDisk Extreme Pro 256GB (175mb/sec version).

It’s only SGD$54 for Samsung 256GB, 4 times cheaper than the SGD$215 Swissbit S55-U 256GB industrial microsd card.

How does the Samsung compare to the Swissbit?

I feel the main differences lies in the acoustics performance.

With the Swissbit, there is more nuanced sense of depth, more pin point positioning of instruments, more sense of ultra soft sounding echos and reverberations in the soundstage. This is something that is not noticeable with the Samsung nor other commercial microSD cards that I have listened to on my wm1am2.

 

[ttt123]

Sound impressions of the Samsung Pro Ultimate 256GB microsd card:

The Samsung Pro Ultimate is certainly an excellent sounding card for the WM1AM2, especially after using deoxit gold to clean the gold contacts.

This card has great frequency balance and great musicalities(bass depth, dynamics and resolution). Excellent black background feel, there is no sense of any haziness(especially after deoxit). In my opinion, the Samsung is the best sounding commercially available(easy to find) card I have heard so far, providing a blacker background than the SanDisk Extreme Pro 256GB (175mb/sec version).

It’s only SGD$54 for Samsung 256GB, 4 times cheaper than the SGD$215 Swissbit S55-U 256GB industrial microsd card.

How does the Samsung compare to the Swissbit?

I feel the main differences lies in the acoustics performance.

With the Swissbit, there is more nuanced sense of depth, more pin point positioning of instruments, more sense of ultra soft sounding echos and reverberations in the soundstage. This is something that is not noticeable with the Samsung nor other commercial microSD cards that I have listened to on my wm1am2.

Great, I'm happy to see your opinion on the Pro Ultimate.

I can get the Pro Ultimate in HK for HKD230/SGD39, so it is a no brainer affordable card, with excellent value for money.

That the much more expensive Swissbit is better, is expected/hoped for.
After all, it would be unpleasant to spend more money and be disappointed.
I faced that situation with the Micron card I bought.

Though, I think, with microSD cards, seeing as how they were not engineered for music reproduction, the end result is unpredictable. As the Audio performance is an unexpected side result, I see the possibility that it could happen that a cheap card could outperform the expensive card. Someday.
It is already the situation that some cheaper cards have an outstanding price/performance ratio. And sound very good.

Kind of like the situation with ChiFi IEMs, where some low price items are shockingly enjoyable. An example of how there is an opposite trend to everything getting more and more expensive. There is now a trend of products offering better and better quality, for lower prices.

I, for one, am happy that this is available, making it affordable to experience new technologies, rather than being shut out by the continual, and rapid increase in prices.

And of course a lot depends on System, Ears, personal preferences. I would say the situation is not so much which one is better, and more that there is now a wider choice for "Audio" performance cards, to meet different preferences. And disregard the price for each, as that is not what we listen to.

There are now good sounding cards from a range of prices. Some people may like one or the other. And not necessarily the most expensive card. Sound, not price, should be the criteria for the choice.

 

[Sonywalkmanuser]

Great, I'm happy to see your opinion on the Pro Ultimate.

I can get the Pro Ultimate in HK for HKD230/SGD39, so it is a no brainer affordable card, with excellent value for money.

That the much more expensive Swissbit is better, is expected/hoped for.
After all, it would be unpleasant to spend more money and be disappointed.
I faced that situation with the Micron card I bought.

Though, I think, with microSD cards, seeing as how they were not engineered for music reproduction, the end result is unpredictable. As the Audio performance is an unexpected side result, I see the possibility that it could happen that a cheap card could outperform the expensive card. Someday.
It is already the situation that some cheaper cards have an outstanding price/performance ratio. And sound very good.

Kind of like the situation with ChiFi IEMs, where some low price items are shockingly enjoyable. An example of how there is an opposite trend to everything getting more and more expensive. There is now a trend of products offering better and better quality, for lower prices.

I, for one, am happy that this is available, making it affordable to experience new technologies, rather than being shut out by the continual, and rapid increase in prices.

And of course a lot depends on System, Ears, personal preferences. I would say the situation is not so much which one is better, and more that there is now a wider choice for "Audio" performance cards, to meet different preferences. And disregard the price for each, as that is not what we listen to.

There are now good sounding cards from a range of prices. Some people may like one or the other. And not necessarily the most expensive card. Sound, not price, should be the criteria for the choice.

There's actually a series of interesting Microsd articles written by this embedded audio player manufacturer which goes in depth into the latency issues and audio glitching issues affecting the embedded player's time critical audio mixing and playback:

A quick refresher: Streaming audio directly from microSD media requires difference performance criteria than for transferring large files. In the latter case, if one read out of thousands or millions takes substantially longer than normal, it's not really noticeable. For streaming and mixing polyphonic audio, one late read can starve a buffer and produce an audible glitch. Many of today's "fast" cards are optimized for file transfers and seem to occasionally pause for housekeeping, making them not so great for use in Robertsonics audio players.

https://www.robertsonics.com/blog/2021/03/25/2021-microsd-card-update

Now there’s no way to know if the customer’s cards were “bad” before audio files were written to them, but I suspect they would have tested “good” when new. If so, then the conclusion is that for some reason, the customer writing files to the card caused some sectors either to go bad, or be identified as bad by the internal flash controller. Perhaps inferior cards do not handle bad sector mapping/substitution as well as others. These are just guesses. There’s really no way to know what the flash controller firmware is doing.

Conclusion​

I remain confident that when a customer experiences audio glitching with a Robertsonics player, the culprit will be the microSD card taking too long to respond to a block read. All of my testing confirms this. How to predict which cards will perform well and which cards will perform poorly, however, I do not know. I do believe that my new Tsunami testing firmware will correctly identify “bad” cards, but whether a card is bad out of the box, or becomes bad after writing audio files to it, I’m not yet sure. More testing is required.

I still have SP 3D NAND 32GB cards that continue to be stellar performers, but two customers have now sent me proof that some do not work well at all. Whether this is because the brand does not have good quality control or something unusual was done to those two cards, I can’t tell.

I will continue to use my new test on other cards, including some of the “industrial” grade cards that I have, and will post any significant findings.

https://www.robertsonics.com/blog/microsd-cards-for-audio-2024

 

[Sonywalkmanuser]

Some interesting post from the Mr. Chen of QLS Audio:

http://bbs.erji.net/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=2200725&extra=&page=5

We mainly conduct comparative tests on the cards from five aspects: 1. The size of the power ripple when reading the TF card. (SONY's 64G PremiumSound card, which sells for more than 1,000 yuan, is said to mainly improve the power ripple when reading) 2. Normal read and write speed. 3. The continuous small block read speed that meets the requirements of our program. 4. AB comparison of sound performance during playback. 5. The stability of the card, mainly refers to the stability during continuous reading (some cards occasionally have no feedback for a long time during continuous reading, causing the reading timeout and crash). The above cards have been tested and compared for several days, and the results are as follows: 1. Netac, Transcend, and Kingston are seriously not recommended. The stability of the cards is poor when reading continuously. The Samsung card, which was said to be basically acceptable before, was later found to have poor stability. In addition to the suppressed sound, there are often problems during playback, so it is best not to use it. 2. The most recommended cards among the cards tested above are: SANDISK Extreme (red and yellow) and SONY 90M/s black (but SONY is often out of stock). These two cards have good speed, ripple and stability. When it comes to the most critical situation, the sound is relatively more atmospheric and delicate, and also more soft and natural. Compared with the two, SONY is slightly more prominent and slightly irritating in human voice, while SANDISK is slightly neutral and slightly pleasant to listen to. 3. The slightly inferior cards are: Toshiba white EXCERIA (black resolution is slightly worse), SanDisk red and gray Ultra. These cards are slightly worse than SANDISK Extreme in sound performance (sound is slightly less loose, slightly flat, overtone moistness is slightly worse, and slightly hard), but they are basically acceptable. Reposted from Qianlongsheng, Mr. Chen.

 

[ttt123]

Very interesting.
The Robertsonic test is for Read latency.
The testing by Mr. Chen/QLS is for power ripple, read/write speed, and also Sound performance.

These, and other tests that have been done for jitter, illustrate that audio is far more tricky than data, and documents some of the things that can go wrong.
And why cards can affect sound.

Of course "we" don't need proof, as our ears tell us. The ears are our "ultima ratio regum".

 

[Sonywalkmanuser]

Very interesting.
The Robertsonic test is for Read latency.
The testing by Mr. Chen/QLS is for power ripple, read/write speed, and also Sound performance.

These, and other tests that have been done for jitter, illustrate that audio is far more tricky than data, and documents some of the things that can go wrong.
And why cards can affect sound.

Of course "we" don't need proof, as our ears tell us. The ears are our "ultima ratio regum".

Personally I think the Samsung Pro Ultimate card's level of sound performance would match perfectly to the ZX707 Walkman's level of sound performance.

 

[Sonywalkmanuser]

Version 1.4 of guide updated in first post. Please redownload to see the updates.
Changes:
Added Bolding of headers to improve readability
Added more opinions on Direct Source Mode On
Added recommended steps to perform after each firmware update.
Added further reading/technical doc links section to last page
Added head-fi URL location to finding this guide
Spelling corrections