Computer Audio Blasphemy, nige tries Another SD Card Player

[Fran]

There was certainly a definite and not insignificant improvement in the sound after having putting in Pearse's SLC panasonic card. I don't think the improvement can be ignored.

[Sligolad]

Well the SD Card player finally sealed the nail in coffin for PC based audio for me when it comes to getting the best sound.
With all my Linear power and gizmos and add ons I could not get near the quality of sound from the SD Card player and particularly using an SLC Card.

And so another chapter begins building an SD Player for top of the heap sound at a ridiculously low cost.
Put my name in automatically lads for any funding round needed for development costs.
I will not be of much use on the software development side but I can develop 3D printed cases for mounting cards, reclockers, power supplies in one box if needed.

[tony]

Fran's player which was fairly stock except I think for the reclocker sounded really excellent and definitely from the session yesterday it seems to well have the edge over Pearse's PC. Have to say my dislike for Van Morrison was copper fastened yesterday. Give me Buddy Holly's 'True Love Ways' as a test track any day over VM. Nicely slipped in by Derek. It sounded majestic and incredible. Of course this is all through Nigel's Soekris Dac and the open baffles which give a huge sound stage and presence coupled with the best level of detail I have ever heard.

Same here for me on development stuff. As per Pearse I can only offer Aidan's services for software development and a good sized listening room for testing.

[Sligolad]

Been hunting the net again for SLC cards and the best price I could find was here:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Integral-End ... 0939143730

Going to try them and see if they are the real deal or not as it does seem cheap for 16Gb SLC.

[Fran]

Was thinking this over a bit afterwards, last night and this morning.

It seems we're at a bit fo a fork in the road with the SD player. We have the potential of great flexibility adn user friendliness with the flashair cards, albeit with some work to do on developing the front end. I'd feel fairly confident we can get there though. However, we now also know that the SLC cards are sonically better by quite the margin - even if the cost could be equal or more than the cost of the whole player and DAC. I know John was talking about some experiments to use a regular card but with nand ram. That seems a fair bit away. Another thought - micro SD SLC cards are a good bit cheaper - heres a 4gb one with 85mb read rate for €63. I wonder would they work in an adaptor.

BTW - if you're looking at these, ignore the class rating (eg class 10) and instead look at the read and write rate.

https://www.mouser.ie/ProductDetail/Pan ... GyeA%3d%3d

[jkeny]

I had a chat yesterday with Tony's son, Aidan who seems to be interested in looking into what we are doing & helping out where he can with a user interface for the existing SD card player. I told him we would be very interested in his input.

@Tony, I'll get a fully working SD card player over to you this week - SD car player + reclocker + PCM5102 DAC, is what you wanted - this can plug into your amp or headphones

[jkeny]

Been hunting the net again for SLC cards and the best price I could find was here:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Integral-End ... 0939143730

Going to try them and see if they are the real deal or not as it does seem cheap for 16Gb SLC.

That's a pretty good price for SLC cards - might try one myself?

[Fran]

Have a look at the read rate though - 30mb/s - given my experience with class 10 cards (adata and transcend) its the read rate thats important rather than class.

Been hunting the net again for SLC cards and the best price I could find was here:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Integral-End ... 0939143730

Going to try them and see if they are the real deal or not as it does seem cheap for 16Gb SLC.

That's a pretty good price for SLC cards - might try one myself?

[jkeny]

Was thinking this over a bit afterwards, last night and this morning.

It seems we're at a bit fo a fork in the road with the SD player. We have the potential of great flexibility adn user friendliness with the flashair cards, albeit with some work to do on developing the front end. I'd feel fairly confident we can get there though. However, we now also know that the SLC cards are sonically better by quite the margin - even if the cost could be equal or more than the cost of the whole player and DAC. I know John was talking about some experiments to use a regular card but with nand ram. That seems a fair bit away. Another thought - micro SD SLC cards are a good bit cheaper - heres a 4gb one with 85mb read rate for €63. I wonder would they work in an adaptor.

BTW - if you're looking at these, ignore the class rating (eg class 10) and instead look at the read and write rate.

https://www.mouser.ie/ProductDetail/Pan ... GyeA%3d%3d

The problem with SLC SD cards is that I haven't found one that has WiFi incorporated but maybe I haven't looked hard enough?
If there was a way to use a micro card in an adaptor that had WiFi functionality, that would be a way around this limitation

What I was suggesting was our own SD card player pcb - one where we have control over the hardware & software - yes, it will require a bit of work & is probably 6 months? before we had anything useable would be available. I'm in communication with a Chinese STM programmer who seems to know his sh1t & is enthusiastic. So far we have just talked about how this could be done & what the options are.

The initial design idea was to use an STM uC on one side of dual port RAM & another processor on the other side receiving files & writing them into the RAM - dual port RAM would allow input of files into one port while reading out files (into STM) from other port for audio processing - kinda splits the input from the output side so they can run on independent clocks & we keep the receiver processing in a separate uC not interfering with the STM doing the audio conversion. My simple idea being to isolate the STM from the electrical noise coming from non-audio related processing.

Having heard the SLC SD card yesterday, it isn't something that can be ignored, as Fran says. But I'm wondering what is it's secret sauce - is it just lower electrical noise as Sony has identified in their SD card or is it SLC (single-level cell) - I know SLC is lower power & probably lower noise so it may not be a requirement to use SLC NAND chips on a proposed pcb card reader

The other thing that we should look at - do we need WiFi SD cards as the means of transmitting audio files to the proposed device - if we have a division of processing (as above with dual port RAM) can we find a faster/better way to transmit files to the device?

The problem is that design decisions made are set in hardware & we won't know the sonic implications of these choices until a fully working device could be heard so we need to be careful in choices & decide what is important

[jkeny]

Have a look at the read rate though - 30mb/s - given my experience with class 10 cards (adata and transcend) its the read rate thats important rather than class.

Been hunting the net again for SLC cards and the best price I could find was here:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Integral-End ... 0939143730

Going to try them and see if they are the real deal or not as it does seem cheap for 16Gb SLC.

That's a pretty good price for SLC cards - might try one myself?

My 8GB Integral SDHC class 4 SD card was one I posted earlier that worked fine with high-res file playback on the existing SD card player