Pitch bug on Clip+?

I was a little hesitant in buying a Clip+ because of the reported pitch problem, but I am giving mine some initial listens.  I must say, that to my ears, the slight pitch error on the Clip+ is not noticable to me.  I have a pretty good natural sense of relative pitch, played instruments when I was younger, in general am pretty obsessive compulsive when it comes to music, and it doesn’t bother me so far. 

I played back some tracks from an album on my desktop, then played back the same tracks on my Clip+, and the pitch increase of a quarter of a percent on my Clip+ was not immediately noticable to me.  Maybe, if I gave it some full attention, I might be able to detect it in a blind experiment, but maybe not.

Anyway, I thought I’d put my two cents in if anyone out there thinks their set of ears might be similar to mine and is curious as to another user’s opinion of the pitch issue.

Message Edited by richter on 11-17-2009 06:35 PM

Newbie here,  So let me jump right in to the DEEEEEP end of the pool…  I am trying to take a workaround approach to this and see where it goes.

   

I have read all 27 pages of this thread with interest.  I have a Clip,  Fuze and a new Clip+.  I recall that the pitch accuracy at 48khz sample rate on both the Clip and Clip+ is on par with other players.  I have all my music archived in Flac right now,  and can convert a working copy with dBpoweramp to either OGG or LAME at 48khz sample rates overnight.  I currently have a 44.1khz mp3 copy of everything  at q=0 vbr so windows media player has a clue what to do with my music.  I would of course keep my original flac files.

  

1.  If I do this to avoid the pitch issue,  will the resulting files have any more loss or artifacts than I would normally have converting to the same bitrate mp3 or ogg at 44.1khz?  I have usually been setting things to max quality ogg q=1 or lame q=0 vbr.  I am certain it wouldn’t be “lossless” to convert to 48khz flac,  so I wouldn’t bother with that for my archival files.

  1. I see that 48khz is the DAT standard.  Do most other mp3 players natively support this by default?  What about Windows Media player (using windows 7) or Winamp?  Other than Sansa I have an original Ipod with Video 80 Gb media player.

  2. Will I take a hit on battery life compared to a file encoded at the same mp3 or ogg bitrate vs 44.1 khz?  I know that “ogg is a hog” when it comes to battery life.

  3. I am not an expert on media, but am I correct in assuming that this would have no relevant effect on IDtag data?

Thanks… 

Gliderguy wrote:

I have read all 27 pages of this thread with interest.

 

You , sir, are a glutton for punishment! :wink:

As far as your workaround thoughts, first thing is to consider this…do you hear the pitch difference? If you had never read about the issue, would you be aware of it?

I read all about it here ever since it was first brought up, and I was never able to hear it for myself. I was able to prove to myself that it existed, by playing a Clip and Fuze in sync with a CD player and comparing the times they finished playing the track. But it never bothered me when I was listening to tunes…apparently I don’t have perfect pitch or golden ears. :smiley:

So if you can hear it, then explore your workaround (which seems pretty well thought out) but if not, just enjoy them the way they are.:smileyvery-happy:

I at least want the forum regulars to know that I will TRY to do my research before asking a question that might have been posted 648 times before.  :smileyvery-happy: 

This is also partly for the people who are so up in arms about the whole thing,  just to remind them that there is a middle ground out there somewhere between a million-man march to the Sandisk headquarters and “Oblivious Contentment”.

 If one is a serious musician (which would NOT be me) it might not be a great hardship to have a set of MP3’s that were encoded at 48khz sampling rate, at least for the critical files that you might be trying to play in tune with. 

It did really have me wondering if 48khz sampling rate for MP3’s might have any SQ benefits for ANY or ALL devices when converted directly from a lossless format,  so this seemed to be the right time and place to bring that up.

Also the power thing… if it takes a tweak to get the speed (nearly) right at 44.1 are we already paying a battery cost vs what SEEMS to be a native speed for the Clip’s D/A converter  of 48khz.  I suspect higher sampling rates  will automatically be more battery intensive,  unless there is a designed native speed where there is an optimum efficiency.

By the way,  I like the irony and alliteration of using Klipsch headphones on my Clip’s.  (Image X10s for critical listening and a set of S4’s for those times I am worried about damage or loss)

Message Edited by Gliderguy on 12-20-2009 06:00 PM

If you had advertised the defect; that would have been honest.  I just bought this for my viola-playing daughter. I’m busy I did not know Sansa made lo quality players.  Ruining her sense of pitch is a great idea.

 

Cut 10% out of the battery life if you must, fix the problem. I’ll do the workaround. Oh boy! I get to spend my time researching defects in a name brand technology and how to solve them. 48 kHz sample rates does emusic sell those files? Oh boy!

  

This is not some impulse purchase from Microcenter for $40. (yes you can get a 4 g mp3 player with a sizeable video screen for that price there.) 

 

IF you want to have a brand, either advertise like apple, (in which case you can sell ipods with batteries that fail or laptops like the 5300 and get away with it cause you’re hip (irony here)) or do not sell junk.  Fix the problem. Any of you remember when the Feds came to regulate analog audio specs (particularly power).  Maybe we need a standard spec sheet made available so I can spend my time listening to music rather than shopping and learning work-arounds. 

@bigbear9 wrote:

Cut 10% out of the battery life if you must, fix the problem. I’ll do the workaround. Oh boy! I get to spend my time researching defects in a name brand technology and how to solve them. 48 kHz sample rates does emusic sell those files? Oh boy!

 

10%???  That’s 1 1/2 hours!  The battery’s already limited to 15 hours!  Get real!  I want more battery power (and no, I don’t notice any ‘pitch’ issues so far).

@fla_hotrod wrote:


10%???  That’s 1 1/2 hours!  The battery’s already limited to 15 hours!  Get real!  I want more battery power (and no, I don’t notice any ‘pitch’ issues so far).

I bet there’s some potential to pick up more battery life if they reduce the S/N ration to 50 dB and the frequency response to 100 Hz to 10 KHz.  And you know what? Most people wouldn’t notice. 

I have read quite a lot of this thread and found it mostly interesting and certainly entertaining. I was intriqued with the idea that the Clip+ might be more efficient with 48khz files and made some test files and started by comparing 44.1 khz files and discovered that my unit played a 322 second file to within one half second of my computer - allowing for lag time with me pressing buttons and/or devices starting, pretty much identical… Given that I am not blessed (or cursed) with perfect hearing and/or pitch (I struggled in high school band), I can muddle through with my limitations and enjoy my $50 music player.

I just bought this for my viola-playing daughter. I’m busy I did not know Sansa made lo quality players.  Ruining her sense of pitch is a great idea.

She plays viola?  Don’t worry, she doesn’t need a sense of pitch anyway (ducks).

Seriously, though, don’t worry about it.  If she has absolute pitch, it is already developed and nothing you can do short of a lobotomy will change her ability.  If she is very strong here then she might find it uncomfortable, but that’s down to her.  Relative pitch perception is unaffected by the actual pitches she listens to. I have very keen pitch perception in certain domains and listening to a reference track I know well, I can feel the difference but it is certainly not significant. 

If I do this to avoid the pitch issue,  will the resulting files have any more loss or artifacts than I would normally have converting to the same bitrate mp3 or ogg at 44.1khz?

Not unduly.  Provided you are above the Nyquist frequency, sample rate conversion does an order of magnitude less damage to the signal than psycho-acoustic compression techniques. For completeness, I would carry out the conversion in FLAC and then compress to MP3 or Vorbis, but in practice I don’t think it would make much difference which you did first.

I see that 48khz is the DAT standard.  Do most other mp3 players natively support this by default?  What about Windows Media player (using windows 7) or Winamp?  Other than Sansa I have an original Ipod with Video 80 Gb media player.

Sampling rate is not really something you “support” as such.  Think of it as tape speed - provided your player accepts that kind of tape, you can play it.  The question is, does it have a speed control so you can match the playback speed to the record speed?  I would suspect WMP and iPod dont and Winamp does, but that is a guess.  

Will I take a hit on battery life compared to a file encoded at the same mp3 or ogg bitrate vs 44.1 khz?  I know that “ogg is a hog” when it comes to battery life.

 No.  The whole point of resampling is that the Clip+ won’t even realise there is a difference and so will feed it through at the correct speed (though that said, 44->48kHz does not sound right).

Vorbis is only battery hungry because nobody makes hardware decoders for it - it is actually a more efficient protocol than MP3 in computational terms.

I am not an expert on media, but am I correct in assuming that this would have no relevant effect on IDtag data?

Can’t see why.

On my Clip+, I did notice a “slow playback” issue more than a “pitch” issue (I realize they are related, but to my ear the slow playback was the main annoyance). After converting the sampling rate of my mp3’s and m4a’s @ 44.1 kHz to mp3’s @ 48 kHz using MediaMonkey, songs sound much better on the Clip+. The playback speed seems closer to normal. It would be good to get definitive answers from Sandisk on:

  • does the slow playback / pitch problem exist on the Clip+ or not, even with the latest f/w rev (my impression is that it does) 

  • do they plan to fix it in a future f/w rev, and if so, when

If anyone has any info about this, pls share w/ the forum. From reading through all these postings (all 27 pages!), I still don’t see definitive answers to these questions.

Thanks to all.  

Message Edited by mihacurt on 02-25-2010 04:10 PM

Message Edited by mihacurt on 02-25-2010 04:11 PM

The pitch bug on the Clip+ is only around 0.25% with recent firmware. On the Clip, it was originally 0.7%, which many people did notice. Most people can’t hear a pitch difference of 0.25%. The Clip+ is slightly fast.

Thanks. That’s interesting. It seemed to me that the playback speed on the Clip+ is slightly slow, but I could be wrong. My songs sound better @ 48 kHz sampling rate, but maybe I just like my music “up tempo”. :smiley: Thanks again. 

@jk98 wrote:
The pitch bug on the Clip+ is only around 0.25% with recent firmware. On the Clip, it was originally 0.7%, which many people did notice. Most people can’t hear a pitch difference of 0.25%. The Clip+ is slightly fast.

 I just got the following reply to my question from Sandisk technical support:

 The Sansa Clip+ has should have no issues with playing songs that have a rate of 48 kHz. However if the playback is slow and you are listening to an audiobook then it is possible that this is caused by a feature on the Sansa Clip+ player. To check if the speed is set to slow please follow these steps:

  • Power the player on
  • From the Main Menu go to Settings (Image of an equalizer)
  • Select Audiobook options
  • Change the Speed to Normal.

Does this mean that the Clip+ requires that songs be sampled at 48 kHz to sound “normal”, and songs sampled at the more standard 41.1 kHz rate will sound slow on the Clip+?

Message Edited by mihacurt on 03-04-2010 03:52 PM

mihacurt wrote:


@jk98 wrote:
The pitch bug on the Clip+ is only around 0.25% with recent firmware. On the Clip, it was originally 0.7%, which many people did notice. Most people can’t hear a pitch difference of 0.25%. The Clip+ is slightly fast.


 I just got the following reply to my question from Sandisk technical support:

 The Sansa Clip+ has should have no issues with playing songs that have a rate of 48 kHz. However if the playback is slow and you are listening to an audiobook then it is possible that this is caused by a feature on the Sansa Clip+ player. To check if the speed is set to slow please follow these steps:

  • Power the player on
  • From the Main Menu go to Settings (Image of an equalizer)
  • Select Audiobook options
  • Change the Speed to Normal.

Does this mean that the Clip+ requires that songs be sampled at 48 kHz to sound “normal”, and songs sampled at the more standard 41.1 kHz rate will sound slow on the Clip+?

 

 

Message Edited by mihacurt on 03-04-2010 03:52 PM

99.99% of people hear nothing wrong with the Clip+ pitch.

Marvin_Martian wrote:


mihacurt wrote:


@jk98 wrote:
The pitch bug on the Clip+ is only around 0.25% with recent firmware. On the Clip, it was originally 0.7%, which many people did notice. Most people can’t hear a pitch difference of 0.25%. The Clip+ is slightly fast.


 I just got the following reply to my question from Sandisk technical support:

 The Sansa Clip+ has should have no issues with playing songs that have a rate of 48 kHz. However if the playback is slow and you are listening to an audiobook then it is possible that this is caused by a feature on the Sansa Clip+ player. To check if the speed is set to slow please follow these steps:

  • Power the player on
  • From the Main Menu go to Settings (Image of an equalizer)
  • Select Audiobook options
  • Change the Speed to Normal.

Does this mean that the Clip+ requires that songs be sampled at 48 kHz to sound “normal”, and songs sampled at the more standard 41.1 kHz rate will sound slow on the Clip+?

 

 

Message Edited by mihacurt on 03-04-2010 03:52 PM


99.99% of people hear nothing wrong with the Clip+ pitch.

Fort those very select few that do, it was announced a while back that it will not be addressed.

The pitch problem was apparent to me upon first listening to my new Clip+ … so I came to this board and to my dismay read Sansa’s official stance on the matter: that it was a known problem and it would not be addressed. Specifically, Sansa indicated that if a customer can hear the lowered pitch, then this is not the product for them.

I promptly returned the Clip+ for a full refund and will spend the rest of my days telling everyone I know to stay far away from this shoddy joke of a product: a music player that PLAYS MUSIC TOO SLOW. A disgrace, and a waste of my time. Luckily, the only money I wasted was the shipping charges on the return mailer. 

Aside from this (in my opinion massive) issue, the player was ideal. There is, however, no excuse for a music player that plays music at the wrong speed and pitch…especially when the manufacturer has been aware of the issue and has the ability to correct it, but chooses not to do so. Shameful.

@theblueangel wrote:

The pitch problem was apparent to me upon first listening to my new Clip+ … so I came to this board and to my dismay read Sansa’s official stance on the matter: that it was a known problem and it would not be addressed. Specifically, Sansa indicated that if a customer can hear the lowered pitch, then this is not the product for them.

 

I promptly returned the Clip+ for a full refund and will spend the rest of my days telling everyone I know to stay far away from this shoddy joke of a product: a music player that PLAYS MUSIC TOO SLOW.

If you indeed read up on it, you will know that this was said about the orginal Clip, _ long _ before the Clip+ was introduced. Further, if you took the time to read (this thread in particular), it’s also been documented by multiple people that the Clip+ plays just a hair fast, not slow.

I’m sorry that you are cursed with such perfect tone & pitch recognition that you can distinguish a difference that even a digital diagnotisic device has trouble registering. But if true, and you’re realy that good, why are you wasting your tiime and money on a product in this price range in the 1st place? That’s like Mario Andretti driving a 3 cylinder SmartCar and expecting it to keep up with the pack of $500,000 Indy racers.

But thanks for your contribution. I’m sure we’re all underwhelmed by your modesty and candor.

@theblueangel wrote:

The pitch problem was apparent to me upon first listening to my new Clip+ … so I came to this board and to my dismay read Sansa’s official stance on the matter: that it was a known problem and it would not be addressed. Specifically, Sansa indicated that if a customer can hear the lowered pitch, then this is not the product for them.

 

I promptly returned the Clip+ for a full refund and will spend the rest of my days telling everyone I know to stay far away from this shoddy joke of a product: a music player that PLAYS MUSIC TOO SLOW.

If you indeed read up on it, you will know that this was said about the orginal Clip, _ long _ before the Clip+ was introduced. Further, if you took the time to read (this thread in particular), it’s also been documented by multiple people that the Clip+ plays just a hair fast, _ not _ slow.

I’m sorry that you are cursed with such perfect tone & pitch recognition that you can distinguish a difference that even a digital diagnotisic device has trouble registering. But if true, and you’re really that good, why are you wasting your time and money on a product in this price range in the 1st place? That’s like Mario Andretti driving a 3 cylinder SmartCar and expecting it to keep up with the pack of $500,000 Indy racers.

But thanks for your contribution. I’m sure we’re all underwhelmed by your modesty and candor.

@theblueangel wrote:

The pitch problem was apparent to me upon first listening to my new Clip+ … so I came to this board and to my dismay read Sansa’s official stance on the matter: that it was a known problem and it would not be addressed. Specifically, Sansa indicated that if a customer can hear the lowered pitch, then this is not the product for them.

 

I promptly returned the Clip+ for a full refund and will spend the rest of my days telling everyone I know to stay far away from this shoddy joke of a product: a music player that PLAYS MUSIC TOO SLOW.

If you indeed read up on it, you will know that this was said about the orginal Clip, _ long _ before the Clip+ was introduced. Further, if you took the time to read (this thread in particular), it’s also been documented by multiple people that the Clip+ plays just a hair fast, _ not _ slow.

I’m sorry that you are cursed with such perfect tone & pitch recognition that you can distinguish a difference that even a digital diagnotisic device has trouble registering. But if true, and you’re really that good, why are you wasting your time and money on a product in this price range in the 1st place? That’s like Mario Andretti driving a 3 cylinder SmartCar and expecting it to keep up with the pack of $500,000 Indy racers.

I’m not sure why you’re being so hostile, Tapeworm. If you don’t notice the pitch difference, then great for you. Aside from the pitch, I think the Clip+ is a fantastic player and certainly a good buy for the money.

I also don’t understand why you make a point of the fact that the pitch bug also existed on the original Sansa Clip. In my opinion, that’s all the more reason to be disappointed that Sansa has still failed to correct it with the Clip+. I never owned a Sansa Clip, so what difference does it make that I would also have been disappointed with that player?

I’ve read this entire thread…and you’re wrong. The playback is SLOW, not fast. The pitch is lower than it should be, not higher. I didn’t have to read ANYthing to know this, since I can HEAR it. 

I wouldn’t say that I’m cursed with perfect pitch, but yes…I was told by my music teacher in grade school and again by a professor in college that I do indeed have “perfect pitch”. If you don’t, and therefore you can’t hear the difference, that’s great. But I can, and it’s unacceptable to me to listen to music played back at the wrong speed (and therefore pitch). 

As to your final point: why am I trying to buy an mp3 player in this price range? Because I don’t have a lot of money to spend. Why else? There’s no correlation between being able to hear slight pitch differences and having a lot of money. No other player in this price range (or in a cheaper or more expensive price range) that has this same pitch bug, so why should it be acceptable in the Clip+? I wouldn’t accept this in any type of music player, whether it was a tape player, a record player, a CD player or a digital music player.

As a consumer who has returned the product for a full refund (and who has done a great deal of talking to my friends and family about how disappointed I am with this product) I thought it might be helpful for Sansa to be aware of exactly why they lost a customer. I don’t understand your animosity.