You know what they always say. "A fool and his money are soon parted."
Seriously though, Sony has decided to take the Monster Cables scheme to another level by selling absurdly expensive SD cards that supposedly "produce less electrical noise" than say... any other SD card. How any company can have the balls to actually release something so scammy blows my mind. From an article at PCWorld:
“Need the perfect expandable storage solution for your $1,200 Walkman? Sony might have a bridge to sell you.
The company is now selling a 64 GB Micro SDXC card “for Premium Sound” in Japan. At $160, it’s four or five times more expensive than a typical 64 GB card, but as the Wall Street Journal reports, it’s supposed to produce “less electrical noise.”
Now, the idea of audiophiles obsessing over barely-perceptible details is nothing new. The speaker market is filled with products whose frequency response exceeds the 20 Hz to 20 kHz range of the human ear, and you can spend thousands of dollars on audio cables in pursuit of eliminating noise.
But while those expenses at least have some technical justifications behind them, the case for audiophile storage is flimsy at best. As writers at The Register and PC Perspective have pointed out in the past, a storage device couldn’t affect digital sound quality without actually changing the actual data being transferred. And if that happened, it be a much bigger problem for all kinds of applications—not just music.
Still, that hasn’t stopped some people from believing the storage device makes a difference, perceiving “more organic” tones in some products and “edgy grain” in others. So when Sony tells the Journal that “we thought some among people who are committed to great sound quality would want it,” it might be onto something.”