@slotmonsta wrote:
Over the last few days there have been several meetings with Engineering, Marketing, and Product Management regarding the pitch issue some users have seen. Please see below a statement regarding the decision that was reached as a result of these meetings.
At SanDisk, our goal with our Sansa MP3 product line is to provide products which deliver a quality consumer experience at price points which are accessible to the majority of the population. Our “value” positioning has served us well historically, although we acknowledge that occasionally our products do not live up to some users’ expectations. The issues raised on this Forum regarding sound fidelity are important to us however due to trade-off decisions that were made in engineering these products to deliver superior consumer value at what we believe are extremely attractive price points, our sound fidelity isn’t perfect. We have re-evaluated the possibility of reducing the pitch variation and due to the engineering trade-offs the decision was made to stay with the current design. Very few listeners, however, have noticed or complained about it as an issue in actual practice. For those who can detect sound differences with their naked ears during actual use and not via frequency analysis, our products may not be the best choice for them.
Forum Admin
slotmonsta
While it’s nice to be informed, I must echo the others in this dissapointing decision. A couple of points I’d like to opinion:
1) This is the second most viewed thread in Clip+'s forum. This is a hot-topic that needs actions, not words.
2) As Marvin_Martian and others have stated, players less expensive than the Clip+ have much more accurate pitch, so the ‘value’ proposition is not a valid argument
3) Many, including myself, have stated that the Clip+ is on the edge of a just noticable pitch difference. You say few people can detect this, but I challenge people on this forum to listen to these clips on Wikipedia and find out if they can tell the difference. Particularily the ‘Six Cents’ and ‘Ten Cents’ clips, as that’s roughtly the pitch accuracy of the Clip+ right now.
4) Rockbox developers have said here that the pitch error could be fixed by adjusting the PLL. Sandisk’s own employee (sansafix) also mentioned this possible fix as well is a previous post here. In fact, sansafix said here that they were able to improve the pitch at the expense of some battery life.
If fixing the pitch does indeed reduce battery life (although sansafix mentioned less than 3%), I’m going to go back to my previous idea to give users the option to enable the fix via the settings menu in the player. Or, as Miikerman said, put a bounty cost for fixing the pitch error. I’m sure you’ll find enough donaters to recoup a programmer’s time/cost.
Message Edited by schnarky42 on 09-23-2009 05:49 PM
Message Edited by schnarky42 on 09-23-2009 05:51 PM