Crave

Donald and Jasmine discuss potential issues with the Android-based Archos 5...namely, why does the sucker keep crashing on everyone? Also, a look at the freshly posted reviews for the Monster Turbine Pro and JayBird Tiger Eyes earphones, as well as the old-school appealing Altec Lansing inMotion Classic. Finally, big ups to SanDisk for its straightforward approach to an audio issue with the Clip.

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Sansa Clip+ is awesome regardless

I've gotta hand it to SanDisk. The company doesn't shy away from honesty. Recently, a handful of Sansa Clip users reactivated a forum topic having to do with apparent pitch issues on the device whereby music plays back ever-so-slightly slower than normal. The concern was that the problem may have carried over to the new Clip+. (Incidentally, based on my testing, it hasn't. If anything, it plays tracks a fraction faster when stacked up against my sound card and Sony Walkman.)

The interesting part, however, is not the existence of some exceptionally discerning listeners--neither CNET testers nor our Audio Precision ATS-2 Audio Analyzer noted anything particularly egregious--but SanDisk's response, which was essentially that in the battle between value and sound quality, value wins. And if you are unsatisfied by the audio offered by a Sansa player, you are more than welcome to look elsewhere for your MP3 player needs. Or, the company's own words:

"Over the last few days there have been several meetings with Engineering, Marketing, and Product Management regarding the pitch issue some users have seen. Please see below a statement regarding the decision that was reached as a result of these meetings. At SanDisk, our goal with our Sansa MP3 product line is to provide products which deliver a quality consumer experience at price points which are accessible to the majority of the population. Our 'value' positioning has served us well historically, although we acknowledge that occasionally our products do not live up to some users' expectations.

The issues raised on this Forum regarding sound fidelity are important to us however 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," per slotmonsta, SanDisk Forums Admin

Maybe this comes off a slight to some, but rarely have I seen a company lay it on the line so directly. SanDisk could have just as easily danced around the topic with circular language or brushed it off entirely, and I have to applaud it for taking the direct approach instead. Maybe I'm giving the company too much credit? Feel free to add your own thoughts below.

(Credit: SanDisk)

Despite its being out of vogue at the moment, I'm still a big believer in the faster-is-better philosophy. That said, I also recognize that it's not always worth the extra cost for some people, and that not everyone can or will always take advantage of it. So that's why I always take announcements about new, high-performance media cards, like SanDisk's 90 megabyte-per-second Extreme Pro line (along with Transcend's similar 600X CF), with a grain of salt. And after running some casual tests on the new card, I've concluded that for now, even only a limited number of pros will see worthwhile advantages to the faster model given the price premium you'll pay.

The point of using a faster card is to free up bottlenecks that constrain performance. In a camera, those occur when shooting in burst mode, when the camera needs to quickly offload data from the buffer to the card. So a card's speedy usefulness is a function of buffer size, file size, controller (interface) speed, and card write speed. On the downloading end, the bottlenecks occur when copying files from the card to the hard disk, where it's determined by the interface speed (USB or FireWire), media read speed, and operating system overhead. A faster card only helps if the card speed is, or contributes to, the bottleneck. So, for instance, if you're shooting burst but the buffer is sufficiently large and the files are sufficiently small, then a fast controller and write speed on the card don't matter. Same goes if the controller technology bandwidth is sufficiently lower than the card's.

What does that mean in real life? Comparing the UDMA 6 90MB/sec Extreme Pro and the UDMA 5 60MB/sec Extreme shooting a burst of 20 raw+JPEG shots in the Nikon D300s--a combined file size of about 19MB--yielded identical burst performance: 2.9 frames per second (fps). There was a difference in the time it took the camera to be ready to shoot again after the burst completed: 13.1 seconds for the Pro versus 14.4 seconds for the Extreme, or a small savings of 1.3 seconds.

With the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, a significantly higher resolution camera with combined JPEG+raw file sizes of 26.3MB, a frame rate differential of 0.2fps did occur--1.8fps with the Extreme versus 2.0fps with the Pro. But that's on average, because the 5D Mark II's buffer only holds 8 shots (the Nikon D300s' holds 12), so the speed difference only shows up after that. It then took 5.9 seconds before the buffer was ready again, compared with 7.8 seconds with the Extreme card. Similarly, with the 15-megapixel 50D, performance diverged by about 0.2fps once you passed the 10-shot buffer limit.

So you really won't see much of a gain unless you shoot relatively long bursts of raw+JPEG files with very high resolution cameras. And keep in mind that it doesn't necessarily apply to all high-resolution cameras. For instance, Sony's A900 and A850 only support up to UDMA 5.

(Credit: SanDisk)

On the download end, the real problem is readers and operating systems. Even SanDisk admits that it's only been able to attain close to 90MB/second speeds with its new ExpressCard reader, shipping in October, and only under OS X. (SanDisk couldn't get me one in time to test its performance.) Even the company's FireWire Extreme reader, currently one of the fastest on the market, only provided a significant performance advantage--39MB/second versus 37MB/second--running at FireWire 800 under Snow Leopard. Oddly, using the reader with a FireWire 400 interface, the Pro card was actually a lot slower, both on the Mac and the PC; And the fastest performance I saw was the older Extreme card, with a rate of 40MB/second on Vista 64 running FW400 (I don't have a FW800 interface for that system). I'm guessing there are some operating system optimization issues here.

The thing is, most pro cameras today are optimized for whatever the highest speed cards available were at the time they were developed, which makes it pretty hard to eke substantial performance gains out of them now, and it'll take a new controller technology, such as USB 3.0, before we'll see significantly better performance for people who aren't working on a 17-inch MacBook Pro. (Perfect time for Apple to remove the ExpressCard slot from the smaller notebooks. Argh.)

With the new card, SanDisk also improves the error correction capabilities for improved reliability--it uses 42-bit ECC up from 10-bit--which is always a plus.

Finally, for many people the price premium may not be worth the small gains. The Extreme Pro cards cost $811.99 (64GB), $507.99 (32GB), and $304.00 (16GB) compared with $375.99 (32GB) and $223.99 (16GB) for the plain old 60MB/second Extreme, which has all the same durability technologies that well, make it extreme. Of course, for a few, every microsecond of performance counts and the time may be worth the money. And if you need that 64GB capacity, well, you're stuck, since there's no 64GB version of the cheaper card, at least from SanDisk. But give it 9 months: once the price comes down a bit, more people have cameras that can benefit from the speed, and we've got the computer interfaces to handle the faster downloads and then I think it'll be a great deal.

As first reported by Paul Thurott of SuperSite for Windows, Microsoft is discontinuing the current generation of Zunes.

So long, Zune 8, we hardly knew you.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Leaving aside all the easy insults--yes, we all know Microsoft never sold many of the things--and the possibility that your candy-apple red Zune 80 may someday be a collector's item, this means Microsoft has basically ceded the low end of the MP3 player market.

While the current Zunes start at $80, the Zune HD, which becomes available on September 15, will run you at least $220. This is great news for competitors such as SanDisk, whose Sansa Clip+ suddenly looks like the best deal around for folks on limited budgets.

On the other end, eliminating the 80GB and 120GB models means that folks with huge digital collections and no interest in touch screens will probably just stick with the iPod Classic, which is pretty much what was happening anyway.

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Once again, Donald and Jasmine promise a "short one" and fail to deliver. How is it that just us talking about two devices manage to stretch on for the standard 30 minutes? We'll tell you: one of them inspires a lovefest that's saccharine enough to make your teeth throb, while the other throws Jasmine into a tizzy dripping with disappointment. This discussion on two new players--the Sansa Clip+ and the S-Series Walkman--is not to be missed. Also, the MP3 Insiders touch once again on the possibility of subscription music on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

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Flash memory and device manufacturer SanDisk clearly has a thorough understanding of the saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." And we sure are pleased about that, because when the company decided to update its extremely popular Sansa Clip, it could have mangled a perfectly peachy player. Luckily, SanDisk knew a good thing when it saw one and created the Sansa Clip+, a fantastic follow-up that builds upon the great foundation of its predecessor. The player continues to offer an ultracompact design complemented by useful features and solid sound quality--and all at an unbeatable price. The Clip+ is available in 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB options for $39.99, $49.99, and $69.99, respectively.

Read the Sansa Clip+ review.

SanDisk Sansa Clip+ photos

I've gotten a few e-mails recently asking if there's a product that can work as both an external hard drive and a network-attached storage device. I only knew of one--the Buffalo DriveStation FlexNet--but now I have another drive to show you, though it doesn't work exactly as an NAS.

(Credit: IOCell)

The NetDisk 351UNE that IOCell Networks announced Wednesday is an external hard drive enclosure that can house a SATA hard drive of any capacity. Apart from the USB 2.0 and eSATA connections, what makes the NetDisk 351UNE different from all other enclosures is that it also has a Gigabit Ethernet port.

This means that apart from hooking up to a computer as a direct-attached-storage device, the NetDisk 315UNE can also be connected to a router, just like a NAS server. However, unlike an NAS server that can work by itself to access the NetDisk over a network, you will need to install its NDAS software on one of the networked computers. The computer then becomes the host let lets others computers access the data stored on the device.

So, basically, this is a network-direct-attached-storage device which, like all external hard drives, depends upon a computer to work.

To make up for this, the device's included software can connect multiple NetDisk 351UNE units in a network and can aggregate up to eight of them into one spanned unit. Personally, I find this to be the only advantage of the device over other external hard drives. Generally, a computer doesn't have more than six USB ports, and there are many devices that would require the use of one. But, this option allows for an easy and affordable way to increase the amount of storage in a network

The NetDisk 351UNE, of course, can only work as either an external hard drive or an NDAS device at one time. According to IOCell, it can deliver transfer speeds up to 60MBps via Ethernet and 100MBps via the eSATA connection.

The device is available now at retail stores and costs $69.99 without storage.

Using an iPod on a Mac is so simple--it's a little scary. With iTunes already installed on every Mac, a newly-connected iPod will just automatically soak up your music collection like a sponge.

But what if you want to use a non-Apple brand of MP3 player with your Mac? iPods are great and all, but they're not for everyone. Even die-hard iPod owners sometimes want a cheap little iPod alternative to take to the gym or hand over to a destructive toddler.

If you're a Mac user whose MP3 expertise begins and ends with iTunes, you might feel a little out of your element when it comes to syncing a non-iPod MP3 player with your Mac. To help you out, I've put together a handy video with some tips and tricks for getting most MP3 players to work on a Mac (sorry Zunesters, still no hope for you).

(Credit: SanDisk)

Flash-memory manufacturer SanDisk announced Tuesday an SDHC card aimed at new Netbook owners disappointed with the skimpy internal storage the micro laptops may come with. On the surface--in the middle and on the bottom, too--it seems SanDisk took a bunch of old, slow Class 2 8GB and 16GB SDHC cards, rebranded them as Netbook SDHC Cards, and doubled the price of the cards to $44.99 and $88.99, respectively; the street prices are a little lower.

On the product page, SanDisk points out that this is a fast way to add more lightweight storage for videos, music, and photos that is also "hidden out-of-sight" since it'll be jammed into your Netbook's card slot. I guess this is good if you don't want to use a thumb drive or external hard drive, but it's also something that can be done with any SDHC card. (I wouldn't want personal photos and videos hanging out unprotected on removable storage regardless of type, but maybe that's just me.)

The site also says you're able to install and run software directly from the cards. This I'm not sure you can do with any SDHC card, but I'm guessing you can since if it were special, SanDisk wouldn't have buried the feature on the list of obvious things you can do with removable memory. (If anyone knows for sure, please leave a comment.)

A quick search turns up plenty of less expensive, faster SDHC cards from quality manufacturers, so there is no reason to buy these cards. I keep thinking I'm missing something here. (Someone please tell me I'm missing something here?!?)