"Advanced solder containing gold for clearer sound" | Hacker News Reader

"Advanced solder containing gold for clearer sound"

sony.co.nz

17 pointsteruakohatu71 comments

I’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

I once talked to an audiophile who claims that they can hear the difference between wav and lossless flac encoded from said wav (flac is worse). Like dude, the decoded audio samples are literally the same bit by bit. But maybe their expensive audiophile setup can't even decode flac without dropping frames.

I keep coming back to this forum post as the most relevant audiophile meme, in which someone finds an alternate memcpy implementation and claims to hear the difference:

https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/11/11997...

  “[..] this version removes the hard edge produced by memcpy”
  “[..] most players use malloc to get memory while new is the c++ method and sounds better”

The very essence of religion.

Satire?

Or dumb as tire.

Wow that is gold. Thank you for this. I'm almost tempted to translate this and share it in a Korean audiophile forum.

I don't know. I remember older PC's of the 486 to Pentium era making different noises via bad active speakers, or even in the FM-Radio. Especially during uncompressing some stuff, but also different operations in different programs.

The same can often be said for todays onboard sound, no matter if via headphones, or active speakers. That's why some people are saying use the cheapest USB-sound-dongle, and enjoy decoupled sound, otherwise enjoy the buzz of your system-busses.

Also mainboard makers advertising some sort of shielding for the audio chip from the rest of the board, for the same reasons.

Memcopy produces a pattern on the memory-bus, which may be audible under some circumstances. Using a different pattern may "sound" different, or not all.

shrug

Remember these Japanese extreme audiophiles having their own special power utility installed? (2016)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-gift-for-music-lovers-who-hav...

I remember seeing this at the time and thinking: wouldn't a custom UPS be better, tunable with custom firmware and a web interface and / or screen, etc.

Someone should build that sort of product and market it to audiophiles.

Edit to add: I see there exists a product category known as power conditioners, that's part the way there.

I 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.

Low quality audio hardware absolutely exists and is rampant at the cheap end. And some standards, like USB2.0 (when used for data), are terrible and will cause audible noise if lots of care isn't taken to filter things and avoid ground loops.

But if you're spending $2500 on a headphone amp instead of $250 on a professional quality audio interface, or $1500 on jewel encrusted RCA cables instead of $30 on balanced XLR cables, or you think 192kHz sounds better than 48kHz because you have superhuman hearing and can somehow hear ultrasound, you're wasting your money and you have no idea what you're doing when it comes to audio quality.

That’s an issue with your cheap connector not filtering it’s power supply and has nothing to do with the physical contacts being used.

>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?

I’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

As another commenter rightly noted below, they are always confident but they quickly shy away whenever an experiment is suggested.

None of them are ever willing to do the experiment (double blind).

I 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.

> over a long period of time, the gold plated connectors will definitely sound a lot better than the corroded whatevermetal ones.

This makes me curious about aluminum, chromium, and stainless steel (which as far as I know is just steel with a lot of chromium in it). I know that technically aluminum corrodes instantly and then maintains a stable corroded state. Will it work as a conductor that way? I have no idea whether chromium is like aluminum, corroding and becoming stable, or if it resists corroding to begin with.

Yep, the most common grades of stainless steel you're likely to encounter are chromium and nickel alloys of carbon steel, with the common marine / surgical grade 316 stainless containing between two and three percent molybdenum for added corrosion resistance.

And yep, they're corrosion resistant because the chromium instantly forms an oxide layer that protects the underlying metal.

Stainless steels are expensive partly because they're difficult to work with, generally having poorer machinability than regular carbon steels, and tend to work harden more rapidly too.

Sure, stainless steel resists corrosion, but it is a pretty bad electrical conductor, especially compared Cu, Au, or Ag. (I'm not disagreeing with you, this is for the benefit of GP.)

What about aluminum? I looked up a table of electrical resistivity:

          resistivity    $/kg
    Cu    1.7e-8            10.3
    Au    2.4e-8         63600
    Ag    1.6e-8           827
    Fe    1.0e-7             ? (cheap)
    Al    2.8e-8             3.23

But I don't know how important any of these numbers are. The table suggests that iron is about 6 times more resistive than copper or silver and 4 times more resistive than gold.

Gold itself looks about 50% worse than copper while being more than six thousand times as expensive, so for gold to be used, resistance to corrosion must be important.

Silver is the best metal listed in the table, and slightly better than copper, so I assume the cost difference explains why we have lots and lots of copper wiring and not so much silver wiring.

Aluminum is a bit (17%) worse than gold for resistivity, but aluminum is cheap. Why use gold? I can imagine a few reasons:

- This table gives values at 20 centigrade, but things change at a more relevant temperature.

- There's some kind of important threshold around 2.5e-8 ohm-meters, so that gold is on the right side of usability and aluminum just misses it.

- Aluminum's corrosion resistance is different in nature from gold's, and the difference matters.

Are any of those true?

> for gold to be used, resistance to corrosion must be important.

from google, copy pasta: "Gold plating is the deposit of a thin layer of gold metal on a substrate, typically in the 0.25 – 5 micron range (0.00001”-0.0002”)."

Not a lot of gold is used in plating the business ends of an RCA cable or TRS connector.

Al, yes, more copy pasta: "Aluminum has a very high affinity to oxygen. When a new aluminum surface is exposed in the presence of air or any other oxidizing agent, it quickly develops a thin, hard film of aluminum oxide (or hydrated oxide in non-stagnant water). This aluminum oxidation is precisely what makes aluminum so corrosion-resistant."

But I doubt the thin, hard film of aluminum oxide conducts as well as gold. Nope.[1]

[1] https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2006/EuniceHuang.shtml

Gold plated connectors are absolutely normal and completely standard and essential. The vast majority of durable data/signal connectors used today are gold-plated. Hack open any random decent microUSB connector if you don't believe me. You need a solid connection for signal integrity. Corrosion messes that up. Of course, with modern cost optimization, usually only the contact surface is gold plated these days, not the entire pin, and the plating is quite thin and cheap. Connectors intended for higher connect/disconnect cycles will be more expensive in part because they need a thicker gold plating to avoid wearing out.

Gold plated PCBs are also completely standard (google ENIG). In this case the plating is even thinner and just serves to ensure solderability and avoid corrosion. It's so thin that it immediately dissolves in the solder during the solder reflow process; it's just there to allow that process to happen properly, and to avoid corrosion in non-soldered areas. Almost every modern high tech PCB

Gold containing solder, on the other hand, is nonsense.

> Gold containing solder, on the other hand, is nonsense.

Well, actually™, it turns out gold-tin alloys (which is what this probably is) get used a lot for solder, particularly in optoelectronic and microelectronic device packaging. You may already know this, but I didn't until tonight, when I thought, "Hey, is this really a thing?" and looked it up. :)

(I can't see anything that suggests it helps with "clearer sound," of course. I also searched for "audio-grade solder" out of curiosity and it seems there are some companies that market solder that way, but they seem to generally be (a) silver alloy, not gold, and (b) regarded rather skeptically.)

I actually didn't know about that one. Sounds like it's mostly for specialty applications though (e.g. ceramic packages). Looks like it's something like 80% gold, so that would get expensive really fast if you attempted to use it like regular solder :)

> I know the reason for gold plating on audio connectors has nothing to do with audiophilia, it is because gold does not corrode.

Yep. Occasionally I read comments to the effect of "sure, gold is technically going to resist corrosion much better, but that's never going to be an issue in practice," to which I can only think: you didn't grow up in Florida without central air conditioning. :)

I admit that it's a pet peeve of mine that "gold audio cables" have become an anti-audiophile meme. There are absolutely a lot of, ah, dubious cables out there, but to my knowledge none of them are using gold for the wire. There are only audio cables with gold-plated connectors, and it's not like they're $300+ specialty items; they're cheap and common.

> 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).

I 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

Thanks for enlightening me. I had no idea and I’ve seen those gold-plated cables for decades now.

I thought the ductility if gold helped make a better connection. More touching surface area.

That 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.

i 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-...

(i still use a Sansa Clip+ with RockBox firmware)

http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/02/sansa-clip-measured.html

My 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).

that 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.

Yeah, 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.

I 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.

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll save it for future reference.

I'm surprised anyone remembers Rockbox, I still use and love it. It helps that some of my old code is buried somewhere in there, that was the first open source project I ever got code into.

It 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.

> "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.

Oh 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.

Example: http://www.soundbuggy.com/Eric/Car%20Audio/phoenix_gold/m_se...

I 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.

How 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.

Do the principles of homeopathy apply?

Absolutely: the less gold you use, the more profit you make!

Brilliant.

Best 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

$900 australian pesos, it better include some gold in this glorified iPod.

Interesting, Sony is targeting a different (older?) audience. "Step back in time with the TPS-L2 soft case" "Cassette Tape UI"

I 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.

http://tandy.wiki/Audiophile_Pricetag

Making 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!

Well, 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.

If 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!

Cleverer than an audiophile, which admittedly is not a high bar, same as other nonsense that people believe in.

Well, at least you’re as clever as an audiophile.

I 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.

$700 for an MP3 player in 2022.

Here'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...

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.

microSD 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.

Who 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.

> Who is paying $3,200

"Audiophiles"

"Audiophiles don’t use their equipment to listen to your music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment."

— Alan Parsons

The term is pretty self-explanatory. Audiophiles are people who love audio equipment. People who love music are called melophiles.

It is essentially a mobile phone running Android with higher end audio components and cellular functionality disabled.

Are the transistors gold plated too?

To 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 ?

Not in solder and not in connections to the battery.

If you were really concerned about service life, you'd be taking issue with the use of lead-free solder.

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