The level of precision they are demanding doesn’t exist in consumer electronics. The average consumers don’t notice or care if their song is 1 or 2 seconds longer, or 20 cents below pitch. 20 cents to them is two dimes.
As for it being “serious testing”, they’ve only tested their own players, and only Sandisk ones, so they can’t say every Sandisk player is “defective”. Since a lot of other brands of players are based on the same or similar chips, it stands to reason they would all have the same “level of precision”.
They need to get over this, and themselves, and move on.
So what level of precision does “consumer electronics” have?
I made 1000 Hz and 1002 Hz wave files in cool edit, converted to flac and ogg/vorbis for the players, and burned to 2 CD’s. Playing 2 sources at the sime time will give a beat frequency equal to the difference in the tones’ frequencies (as anyone who’s tuned 2 instruments against each other knows). The 1002 hz file was a sanity check to make sure I could hear the beat when 2 sources are known to be off… worked in all cases.
Playing Cool edit against foobar on the same PC, flac, wav, or ogg, no beat (everything consistantly in tune)
CD player vs DVD player (both fairly cheap consumer models, different brands and about 20 years apart in age) - roughly 30 seconds per beat (1/30 hz), for an difference of 1 part in 30,000 or 0.003%
CD player or Cool Edit vs Sansa E200 (rockbox playing flac)- beat of ~1/3 Hz, error 1 part in 3000, or 0.03%.
Cool Edit vs Neuros player (playing ogg file) - Also about 1/3 Hz, so 0.03%
Cool Edit vs Clip (playing flac) - beat of 7 Hz, error about 1 part in 140 or 0.7% I checked this one by generating a new wave of 1007 Hz, which was in tune with the Clip playing the “1000 Hz” file.
So the Clip’s pitch error (and presumably play speed error) is over 20x worse than my other portables, and 200x worse than the difference between my CD player and DVD player.
So the typical standard for consumer electronics (including an older Sansa model) really is a lot better than the current lot.
Another poster mentioned his multi thousand dollar turntable being off in speed. The one I got used for $150 has adjustable pitch and the strobe pattern on the platter just stands still after adjustment.
Message Edited by donp on 02-01-2009 03:21 PM
