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"Advanced solder containing gold for clearer sound"
- elmerfud 5y agoOh the advertising people are in overtime I think. Anyone else remember the old school Phoenix Gold amplifiers that have gold plated circuit boards. They sure were pretty to look at.
- COGlory 5y agoExample: http://www.soundbuggy.com/Eric/Car%20Audio/phoenix_gold/m_series/outlaw/amp_guts_1.JPG http://www.soundbuggy.com/Eric/Car%20Audio/phoenix_gold/m_se...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- danielsokil 5y agoInteresting, Sony is targeting a different (older?) audience. "Step back in time with the TPS-L2 soft case" "Cassette Tape UI"
- Wohlf 5y agoI love my Sony MDR headphones, barely changed over the years as best I can tell and I only needed to swap the pads so my ears were more comfortable for long periods. My Sennheisers sound a bit better and are more comfortable but not enough to justify the price difference.
- e2le 5y agoAre the transistors gold plated too?
- electric_mayhem 5y ago$700 for an MP3 player in 2022.
- ModernMech 5y agoHere's one for $3200. It has some sort of fancy copper case that I presume makes it worth this much money? https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders/walkman-mp3-players/p/nwwm1z https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders... It comes with 256 GB capacity for storing a whopping "1,600 High-Resolution Audio tracks", I guess at 160MB per song. I guess those DSD files can get pretty big.
- teruakohatu 5y agoWho is paying $3,200 for an MP3 player. I can understand $700. For that much surely the inside of the case could be machined better.
- unmole 5y ago> Who is paying $3,200 "Audiophiles"
- SllX 5y agomicroSD slot, USB 2.0, supports WMA but not DRM-ed seeing as how PlaysForSure is dead but damn if it doesn’t look pretty. I also appreciate how on the specs page, under the listing for High Quality Audio it doesn’t say “Yes” or “No”, it says “High Quality Audio”. It also supports Macs, but only Mac OS X 10.8-10.11 if the spec sheet is to be believed. But that USB port is maybe the bigger ding for that price. This is a problem I have with most Lightning-port devices too, but I can’t believe people still sell what are effectively mass storage devices with only USB 2.0. Not even 3.0! I don’t care what the port at the end looks like, but 2.0 is 480 Mbps CPU-bound when FireWire 400 devices from 1999 had more consistent throughput and even that would be too slow for the size of the drives that are typically attached today.
- bombcar 5y ago$900 australian pesos, it better include some gold in this glorified iPod.
- Bud 5y agoHow much gold, precisely? One wonders when we'll be graced by Sony's white paper on how precisely this gold is magically making sound "clearer". I bet that'll be a doozy.
- teruakohatu 5y agoDo the principles of homeopathy apply?
- thematrixturtle 5y agoAbsolutely: the less gold you use, the more profit you make!
- MarcelOlsz 5y agoBrilliant.
- creakingstairs 5y agoI’m not sure if this is something in other countries too. But some of the extreme audiophiles in Korea have given us some amazing memes. One claimed they could tell the difference in sound by the source of the electricity. Gold plating also gets brought up a lot. Some people claimed that music from gold plated sata cable!! sounds better, so someone had set up an experiment with an open invitation, only for no one to turn up [1]. [1] https://namu.wiki/w/순은%20SATA%20케이블%20논란 https://namu.wiki/w/순은%20SATA%20케이블%20논란
- javajosh 5y ago>One claimed they could tell the difference in sound by the source of the electricity How confident are they of this? Would they be willing to do the experiment?
- robinson7d 5y agoI’d suspect likely the same result as the gold plated sata cables: > someone had set up an experiment with an open invitation, only for no one to turn up
- marcan_42 5y agoNone of them are ever willing to do the experiment (double blind).
- creakingstairs 5y agoAs another commenter rightly noted below, they are always confident but they quickly shy away whenever an experiment is suggested.
- xyzzyz 5y agoI have a cheap S/PDIF to RCA converter, powered by DC from micro USB connector. You can definitely hear distortions and background hum with some USB chargers.
- marcan_42 5y ago
- leeoniya 5y agoi think we all want to know: is it the awesome sound of 24k gold or the washed out garbage of mere 18k gold? disclaimer: my audio card has swappable op-amps :D https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Sound-Cards/Hi-Fi/Essence_STX_II_71/ https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Sound-Cards/Hi-... (i still use a Sansa Clip+ with RockBox firmware) http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/02/sansa-clip-measured.html http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/02/sansa-clip-measured.html
- ComputerGuru 5y agoMy Sansa was stolen when my car was broken into it years ago. I still find myself wishing I had it, but not enough to seek out a comparable replacement (if such a one exists).
- leeoniya 5y agothat sucks :( they're next to impossible to find now. i have an extra battery from ebay for mine when the inevitable happens and i have to crack it open for the swap. i looked a couple years ago for something with a bit bigger screen that can be flashed with rockbox and has comparable audio fidelity, plus sd card storage and came up empty, or absurdities like the OP.
- ComputerGuru 5y agoYeah, everything out there now seems to be a customized Android so "extreme bloat hidden behind a minimalistic UI" with all the latency and lag that entails (to both audio and UI). But there is a suggestion in a sibling comment I'll have to check out.
- kadoban 5y agoI grabbed a "AGPTEK HiFi Bluetooth MP3 Player Rocker V2", which is compatible with Rockbox, a while back. It's about as nice as I remember my old Sansa being.
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
- pleb_nz 5y agoBest place for the gold, between the battery and circuits. I wouldn't want my sound to degrade when I store it in the battery buffer. Looks like a cool device though
- Maursault 5y agoI don't know what the audiophiles are talking about, silver is a better conductor than gold, but I know the reason for gold plating on audio connectors has nothing to do with audiophilia, it is because gold does not corrode. What this has to do with sound is skew to the reason it is used, as technically, over a long period of time, the gold plated connectors will definitely sound a lot better than the corroded whatevermetal ones.
- dtx1 5y ago> don't know what the audiophiles are talking about They don't know either. Audiophiles are by and large the dumbest consumers on the planet, willing to pay for huge sums of money to grifters and lying companies for imaginary gains that are either not measurable or well below the threshold any human could conceivably hear a difference. And they are so deep in that trap that they get angry when they are called out on their bullshit (see MQA for example).
- vmception 5y agoI just like walking into Best Buy to see how the floor staff is going to lie to me Someone should make a YouTube channel with this kind of content, adding laugh tracks to every way they try to close to sale
- jimbob45 5y agoThanks for enlightening me. I had no idea and I’ve seen those gold-plated cables for decades now.
- cjbgkagh 5y agoI thought the ductility if gold helped make a better connection. More touching surface area.
- kadoban 5y agoThat seems unlikely to me. Ductility is important for deforming the material into wires or sheets. If your connectors are pushing hard enough on each other to permanently deform the materials, something is seriously wrong.
- thoweir234324 5y agoTo all the sarcastic posters: you do realize Au has a lower resistance, and much better wear characteristics, both of which are important not only for Analog signals but also for digital ones (atleast in terms of service life), right ?
- _moof 5y agoIt gets worse: "Rigid aluminium milled frame for improved sound quality. The premium aluminium milled frame provides superior rigidity for low impedance and clear, stable sound and solid bass." You might as well say you put leather seats in a car so it'll go fast and run longer between oil changes. "Optimised circuit board layout. By dividing the Audio block and the Power/Digital block…" …we have done kindergarten-level electrical engineering that is taught the very first time anyone combines analog and digital circuits.
- colanderman 5y ago> "Rigid aluminium milled frame [...]" That statement actually makes sense for a speaker -- you want the speaker coil moving air, not vibrating the speaker cabinet. Too bad this isn't a speaker.
- not2b 5y agoI once had an otherwise brilliant colleague (PhD, highly respected compiler guru) who believed all this autophile nonsense and would shell out for ridiculously expensive cables and ludicrously over-engineered stuff that didn't matter, and the people he followed discouraged blind testing, evidently things should better if you just know about your golden solder and cables.
- tjr225 5y agoMaking fun of audiophiles is about as close to “beating the dead horse” as I can think of. If you think this is funny or interesting; reflect. Perhaps, if talking about this, your life is as just about as uninteresting as an audiophiles? For what it’s worth, I am not an audiophile- I just can’t believe slashdot/hackernews has been beating this dead horse for coming on 20 years!
- TulliusCicero 5y agoWell, there are still audiophiles who believe in ridiculous nonsense, so I don't see the harm. I'm far from obsessed with audiophiles, but it is pretty funny when it comes up. Same as people who believe in other forms of nonsense, like flat earthers and what have you.
- tjr225 5y agoIf you want to bother yourself with it go for it, seems like a waste of time to me. My point is that if you feel clever, you’re not!
- TulliusCicero 5y agoCleverer than an audiophile, which admittedly is not a high bar, same as other nonsense that people believe in.
- tjr225 5y agoWell, at least you’re as clever as an audiophile.
- lokedhs 5y agoI think the remarkable thing in this case is that the vendor is Sony, not some off-brand vendor trying to sell their stuff to audiophiles. Then again, a dedicated music player isn't something most people would want, so perhaps only audiophiles would be interested in them at all? And if you want to sell to them, you need to use marketing language that they understand.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Brian_K_White 5y agohttp://tandy.wiki/Audiophile_Pricetag http://tandy.wiki/Audiophile_Pricetag