Internal memory in Soundcore products

Where’s there an engineer who is qualified in math, electrical engineering and electronics, there’s a way.

Anything else is just marketing hype and disappointment.

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If we ever see internal memory in a Soundcore product, maybe it will be thanks to this discussion and our feedback :grinning:.

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As I’ve already mentioned, they did have it in the Mini which they still sell so they know already there’s a market.

For sure this discussion may help remind them as they’ve probably not deemed a worthwhile addition give they only ever did it one product to date.

Probably most helpful is for us to guide them to how it would be deployed, which products first, how it is controlled. They can easily make the addition in an unworkable method or… they ask us.

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@The_Professor What “maybe” had little value in the loudspeaker can be a great addition to headphones.
You can imagine it - the entire collection of Beethoven’s 9 symphonies in the headphone memory, eg Q35X, in excellent LDAC quality without Bluetooth, without internet, without a smartphone.
You take it anywhere and you listen. You will get bored - you upload yourself The Beatles discography.
A revelation for me.

I am familiar with the concept, we used to have headphones with radio and MP3 player built-in, the antenna in the headband, this was before smartphones.

The reasons those products died away was because the diversity of sound sources (apps), media types, codecs of media, were simply easier to keep up with on the phone and the headphones became “dumb”.

Not saying this is a bad idea, just it would tend to fizzle out if tried again as the product would end up not being able to do something a product which relied on the phone could do and you get a “why bother” outcome a year or so later.

A similar thing happened in video, while MP4 was meant to be portable, only certain video+audio codecs would work portable. x265 for example killed older video media players.

I like offline media and standalone, but I reconverted my media to work on anything.

I suspect if there’s an engineer aged over 50 in Soundcore they think it’s been tried and eventually will fail, while someone in their 20s would think it a new idea to try.

I don’t see a reason why not in at least speakers, headphones, costs pennies with no downside. The issue will be the kickback and negative feedback from reviews of the “doesn’t support …” and “only works for…”.

The funny thing is a lot of stuff is going to 2k or 4 k and I know some of the phones do not give you media players to play it. I think there is the constant technological increases that older stuff gets forgot. So the new trend we should get going devices with sd slots or devices with dedicated hard drives maybe

That is what killed storage in audio devices, the pace of change made it uneconomic to attempt to keep up in a $20-$100 product, it got outsourced, offloaded, to the $400+ phone and just the Bluetooth connection.

It is very cheap to add to audio products so a “why not” thought, but it was tried and died as an idea already. The smartphone won.

I have standardised on MP3 and MP4 and store offline, keep about 1TB of media, with 128GB SD in my tablet copy.

I do something similar. I usually try to keep a few copies on different media to handle anything getting lost.

Smart phones have won. I hate they will sell you a tablet with say an 8 gig drive and after you get it, you find out over 1/2 of it is filled with app and operating system. It is not as bad when you get the larger size drives. I always thought if they stated say the 8 gig then they really should have given a 12 gig drive with 4 gig of operating system and software and 8 for you to use. My thoughts is that apps and other files are just so huge now and that extra space is always nice to have.

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It is even worse than that.

Common now is a read-only OS overlayered with a read-write data. After a phone stops receiving OS updates (the read only part) then app changes become more of a delta in the read-write so the phone gets full.

However, I know and have always bought the higher storage model to delay the forced obsolecence problem, and stuck with Android as you can flash a newer, and so indirectly smaller, OS from the open source community.

Anker / Soundcore would have similar issues, they’d have to basically run an OS in their products to make them media players and then support it for the life of the product. I can almost feel the cringe in a Chinese engineer’s mind at that thought.

I try to go to the higher models when it is possible after the first two or so. I have also took a chance on a device or two that was not from the top 2 makers. The one brand was not too bad (Toshiba) and it had some cool functions on it that I ended up not using as much LOL. (able to connect to hdmi and had a hdmi port)

I know one of the brands that I bought their OS allowed for you to place part of the app software onto the SD card. That was pretty nice and save hard drive space but I can not remember which device it was…

One of my early favorites was a Samsung media player. It had a radio with a 5 inch screen. I did it as ipods were like 3.7 at the time and Samsung seemed to be a big player . A little bit after I got it, I come to find out that they were not selling them anymore. So, I ran the slow device obsoletion. I will say that although obsolete the radio functionality (non internet radio) never failed until the device just conked out.

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:thinking: Nowadays, headphones are becoming as indispensable as a smartphone. Manufacturers may use in the future to create something like TicTok directly in the headphones.
Advanced artificial intelligence will choose the music for you based on what you search and listen to.
Your only task will be to press the button: “Power on” :grinning:

There is coming more intelligent audio products, there was a new set of SoC announced spring last year which the pandemic interrupted mass production, but should be out soon.

The key difference is listening to ambient and keywords and learning appropriate actions.

The sort of thing you’ll see is when a vehicle is approaching you the ANC will stop and shift to ambient mode. That uses the doppler effect to sense approaching.

Storage however, particularly SD, does has space and power issues. I’d expect 4GB to be the upper limit in any product smaller than headphones.

But I also feel that any brand which adds the storage will tank, fail, it’s an already tried and failed idea, but good luck to anyone who tries it (again).