Tag Archives: SanDisk Sansa

Electronics, Rockbox

Sandisk: “our sound fidelity isn’t perfect”

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Some owners of the SansSanDisk Sansa Clipa Clip player from SanDisk noticed that it does playback of all songs with a minor pitch. Due to a flawed HW setup they don’t do a proper 44,100 Hz but instead 43,791 Hz (0.993 times the target value) or something like that. According to some sources this problem might be fixed in the Sansa Fuze players now.

Bugs aren’t really so surprising, perhaps what is surprising is that this bug has been around now for almost two years. To make matters worse, SanDisk now decided that due to them making cheap players people shouldn’t expect them to be very good sound quality wise and therefore they can simply not fix the problems:

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.

Clip owners out there now put their hope even more on Rockbox for Clip.


Rockbox

Rockboxitunes

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Frank Gevaerts and Jonas Häggqvist in the Rockbox project spent some time the other night when they should’ve been sleeping and made the Rockbox USB stack possible to fake being an iPod and thereby tricking iTunes to work with a non-iPod player quite transparently. As the picture shows, the target used here is a SanDisk Sansa e2x0 player…

frankosansa

This is still work in progress and not yet in SVN. Keep up with the bleeding edge activity in the #rockbox IRC channel on freenode!

Rockbox

More fresh Rockbox targets

I’ve not mentioned anything about developments on new Rockbox targets lately, so I thought I’d do a little run-down of the targets that seem to have momentum right now:

Toshiba Gigabeat S – quite similar to the Zune hw-wise but not entirely. This already runs Rockbox pretty good and even has music playback. Still not offered for download and treated as “supported” since there’s currently no user-friendly installer method, especially on Windows. Freescale i.MX31L equipped.

Philips GoGear SA9200 – PortalPlayer based thing with the same SoC as the Sansa e200 v1 series and uses mi4 like many other PP targets.

Creative Zen Vision:M – Still a rough install method that requires you to rip out the harddrive, insert it into another computer, wipe the FS and replace it with FAT and then it still has no music playback… but there’s a video showing how it looks!

SanDisk Sansa “v2 series” – The recent architectural upgrade by SanDisk is quite similar over a range of models (e200 v2, c200 v2, m200 v2, Clip, Fuze etc) and recently there have been lots of new info creeping up in the forum thread, offering hope we might soon see a proper “first shot” at flashing a modified firmware.

SanDisk Sansa C100 – one of them TCC based ports that use tcctool to download code and execute in RAM only during a trial period, and that’s indeed a convenient way!

SanDisk Sansa M200 (v1) – very similar to the C100 model hw-wise, tcctool etc. There’s a working LCD driver but no NAND one…

Cowon D2 – I mentioned it before, but it is worth repeating since there is still work going on. Touch screen code has been committed and it seems quite useful at this point. No music playback yet and there’s something shaky with the NAND driver I believe.

I probably missed some model(s) (like I didn’t repeat the Meizu M6 work), but I think the picture is clear anyway: there have been some frantic action in the Rockbox camp lately and it shows that we have a large number of people who enjoy bringing Rockbox to even more targets…