This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 10:09:54 am
content: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops(Warning: Do not listen to on an old laptop with a 5400rpm HD if the manufacturer hasn't applied the audio filter in their sound card driver...)

author: AVGresponding
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 12:10:19 pm
content: I think you mean 5400rpm (90Hz)? Presumably this also means 7200rpm drives would potentially be vulnerable to 120Hz resonance...

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 01:27:22 pm
content: I call bullshit.EDIT: Sorry, I should clarify, yes, really loud noises and harsh vibrations can damage hard disks. That's nothing new. As for laptop speakers (or even typical desktop speakers) causing problems, I highly doubt it. Whilst spinning rust hard disk drives are precision instruments, they are pretty resilient, especially the 2.5" laptop drives. Not to mention laptop speakers simply wouldn't have anywhere near enough output capability to be able to damage anything. They would tear themselves apart long before they damage a hard disk.Also, why single out laptops? There are several all-in-one desktop machines and car infotainment systems that used 2.5" drives with much bigger speaker drivers/woofers, yet, no signs of any issues there.Finally, as a gay guy who listened/listens to a lot of Janet Jackson at volume, I've never killed a hard drive.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 02:16:24 pm
content: From what I saw, I bet it was one particular drive type. I do not believe that the drive was mechanically damaged, definitely not enough vibration for that, the only thing I could think of is that there is a tone or note, most likely not even a bass one, but a high frequency one which resonated with the linear head servo tracking armature positioning feedback and class D drive tracking amplifier's circuitry.I agree the volume isn't enough for a classical mechanical problem, however, a perfect fluke circumstance of drive design and how the head tracking linear servo which uses a class D positioning amp with feedback can be manipulated to oscillate like mad with the perfect tone in the few khz range. This might even trigger the emergency 'anit-shock' shutdown feature available on some drives. Or, the linear servo tracking amp's class D servo driver in this circumstance will momentarily draw too much current, or even short out. The low 80hz tone affecting the drive is BS unless you pump hundreds of watts of acoustic power right into the drive while writing data.

author: AVGresponding
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 04:13:16 pm
content: Quote from: Halcyon on January 07, 2023, 01:27:22 pmPresumably because of the close mechanical coupling involved in laptops and their speaker systems. I have doubts also, but it's theoretically feasible if your laptop and HDD is badly enough designed.Given the rotational speed of the platter is a known factor, and given the incredibly small distances between bits/tracks on the platter, I expect resonances around that frequency and its harmonics are designed out. Still, designers and engineers are human too, and mistakes can be made

author: Benta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 08:43:25 pm
content: I call bullshit as well.I read the story elsewhere (can't find it right now, sorry), but the point was that extremely agressive copy protection wreaked havoc on Win machines (as always). It's a Big Music plus Microsoft thing.

author: Ed.Kloonk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 08:47:49 pm
content: I too, call bullshit.I mean who defuq is still rocking a laptop with a 5400rpm drive? *and* also listens to Janet Jackson?Bad choices have consequences.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 08:49:14 pm
content: Quote from: Benta on January 07, 2023, 08:43:25 pmThe story is not about DRM but about vibration at certain frequency causing HDD malfunction. FWIW HDDs are sensitive to vibration, so the story has some plausibility.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 08:50:53 pm
content: Quote from: Ed.Kloonk on January 07, 2023, 08:47:49 pmIt's a very old story and many laptops still have a HDD which usually is 5400RPM.

author: Ed.Kloonk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 08:52:35 pm
content: Quote from: Halcyon on January 07, 2023, 01:27:22 pmSubstitute Tom Cruise in Risky Business with Halcyon. Now substitute Bob Segar with Janet Jackson.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 08:59:54 pm
content: Quote from: Halcyon on January 07, 2023, 01:27:22 pmWell, the story is not about physical damage but OS crashing on certain laptop model while playing that song. While the story may be fake, IMHO it's far from impossible.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 09:01:24 pm
content: Quote from: wraper on January 07, 2023, 08:49:14 pmYep. The less plausible part is that the laptop's speakers would have high enough output for low frequencies to cause any issue.Those tiny speakers usually have a pretty poor low-freq response. So it sounds pretty unlikely to be able to couple vibration with enough amplitude to cause damage to a hard drive. So yeah, not impossible but rather unlikely.But it's a funny story nonetheless.

author: Benta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 09:02:08 pm
content: I'm certain Adam Neely is a great musician and YouTuber (never heard or seen any of his stuff).But he's certainly not an engineer or even a technician.Why publish/propapgate this kind of cr*p? What's the point? Wasting people's time?

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 09:08:08 pm
content: By long term Microsoft devhttps://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220816-00/?p=106994

author: Benta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 09:45:46 pm
content: Raymond Chen: "A colleague of mine shared a story from Windows XP product support." [must have been around 2005. My comment].This anecdote gets taken up by various media (most of whom should have known better) and published in August 2022... 17 years later.Now, I've told many stories at company parties, where alcohol was freely available, some with laughter, incredulity and success, but also some that fell flat.Considering that Mr. Chen (who's a SW guy BTW) is the ONLY source for this story, I'll relegate it to the "Urban Legends" area.Sorry.

author: eti
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 09:54:24 pm
content: How very kind and responsible of you to post it, knowing that some people will curiously just click "play"... and then realise that the very thing has now happened to their laptop. I'd maybe have added"CAUTION - DO NOT PLAY THIS VIDEO UNTIL YOU HAVE READ THE ENTIRE SUBJECT; THIS VIDEO COULD BREAK YOUR HARD DISK!"

author: Benta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 10:11:08 pm
content: You usedbold,red, CAPATALIZED text for your reply...Your head will blow up in a few seconds!

author: Ranayna
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 07, 2023, 10:17:41 pm
content: Way to blow this "warning" out of the water, @eti.1. This story is old2. Only applied to certain models of harddrives3. Only in rare cases anything happened, even of problematic laptops4. This was not permanent damageAs often typical, this story is *way* overblown. It has a true core, that likely gotten bigger and bigger with each retelling since it was rediscovered last year.The likelyhood of anyone having a laptop with a potentially affected harddrive still in active use today is close to zero.

author: AndyBeez
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 08, 2023, 12:57:12 am
content: Floppy drives take revenge...As big brother says, Janet, Just Beat It:

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 08, 2023, 03:18:03 am
content: Ok, what the hell. I figured I would check and got bot a lossless and .mp3 & youtube source of the track.My usual suspect, a nasty 15.7khz tone which I can actually hear in some tracks was missing and there was not a shifted version of that tone. IE: I found music tracks where there has been 18Khz tones.All I could find was a slightly prevalent 18.25Khz and 16.25Khz tone spiking throughout the track. (Thankyou for CoolEdit 96's bugged super fast realtime spectrum analyzer on my old 32bit system.)During the heavy synthesized bass and hi-hats crash, this tone makes it up to ~ -15db. Not enough, but it even stands out more on the .mp3 due to the compression cut-out filtered nature of the high band.My only guess was the sampled synth instrument had the nasty 15.7Khz contamination during sampling, then was pitch-bended when a particular note for that sample was chosen.See my scan of the last low volume during the last second of the song:Legend:A- This 18.25khz tone gets really significant during every first strike of the ~8 bass/drum notes during the chorus. (NOT SHOWN: 16.25Khz spikes hits ~-12db, the loudest of the high frequency tones)B- So does this 7.125khz. Probably another residue sampling artifact from those nasty NTSC 15.7Khz fly-back coil transmission which contaminates around 20% of classic rock and dance and even classical music from the 80's and 90's, except those songs have it at it's true un-modified 15.7KHz.C- Typical 8-bit DACs dithering noises.D- Don't know, bit it also stands out during heavy beats.Unless you sit the HD by itself on a very loud woofer, I don't think the ~80hz will do much.We can also be thinking about this wrong, such old HDs may have had a few critical ceramic caps in their design and we here at EEVBlog know about the 'Microphonics' of ceramic caps. A perfect note or tone can inject a nasty voltage into some of the drives circuitry as well. This includes the voice coil & neodymium magnet setup for the head's linear actuator.Read the proceeding messages below. It is most likely the emergency free-fall power-cut protection accelerometer in some old laptops being tricked by the music.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 08, 2023, 03:34:11 am
content: Note, my HP laptop has an accelerometer feature for the HD protection which can be enabled/disabled in the advanced HP tools. I wonder if the music is just tripping such a protection feature in these laptops.

author: Ed.Kloonk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 08, 2023, 04:14:56 am
content: Cool edit.Ahead of it's time.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 08, 2023, 11:43:02 am
content: Quote from: BrianHG on January 08, 2023, 03:34:11 amI think this is it. The video in Adam's video @1:33 shows the laptop powering off completely. If the HDD crashed, you might expect a lock up of the system or a BSOD, not a power down. I know that the accelerometer protection on my older Lenovo laptop powered the whole system down. Not sure why - maybe to provide more consistency for the user after a drop (a hung system is worse than a powered-off one?)

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 08, 2023, 11:49:17 am
content: Quote from: tom66 on January 08, 2023, 11:43:02 amWell, the way that bass line sweeps in frequency may match some code in the accelerometer thinking the laptop was dropped, or, hit off a table.As for killing system power, doing so may protect from a head to disk collision to any and all HDs installed in the system in a single swoop, regardless of their model type, rpm, or designs. Meaning if you change the laptop to a third party HD, the accelerometer function will still work.Also, a hard wired emergency power cut means you do not have to wait for Windows to do something to save your HD before impact, and it will work with any installed OS so long as the bios has the feature turned on.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 08, 2023, 12:13:39 pm
content: Accelerometers with built in free fall detection is actually a big feature, like this one:https://www.st.com/resource/en/design_tip/dt0100-setting-up-freefall-recognition-with-sts-mems-accelerometers-stmicroelectronics.pdfYes, some of the settings will directly trigger the interrupt output pin within a detected 50-100hz sweep.(Googled...)If the sensitivity of the laptop's accelerometer was set too high, yes it will pick up audio just like a microphone as you can see in the .pdf that it is sensitive way into the 400hz region. Have a laptop where the accelerometer is next to the speaker, yeah, it's gonna trigger when set to it's minimal quickest response sensitivity setting.

author: ebastler
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 08, 2023, 12:54:27 pm
content: Going as far back to the source of this story as I can, I find the following on Raymond Chen's blog,https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220816-00/?p=106994:Quote"I heard this from a colleague, who had heard it from someone at some major computer manufacturer...". Oh, this is how all urban legend stories start? Oh, right...

author: Buriedcode
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 09, 2023, 01:20:21 am
content: Quote from: BrianHG on January 08, 2023, 03:34:11 amI'm pretty sure most 2.5" drives have shock sensors, at least in every one I have seen/repaired. They look like ceramic resonators, a few of them are used to park the heads before impact.https://www.murata.com/en-global/products/sensor/shockI suspect you're correct. It's either mems accelerometers (which are, what 15 years old now?) or the above which have been about since 2.5" drives. Either way I can't imagine it being particularly damaging, especially as few laptops have any real audio power to their speakers. Interesting video, but "breaks" is a stretch.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 09, 2023, 05:14:55 am
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on January 07, 2023, 09:01:24 pmYep, I'm in that camp as well. Technically possible, but highly unlikely in practice.The hard drives would have been vibrationaly frequency sweeped during operation to verify this isn't an issue.

author: Ed.Kloonk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 09, 2023, 05:43:08 am
content: Quote from: BrianHG on January 08, 2023, 12:13:39 pmAt the risk of being pedantic, when they say it "turns off the hard drive", I wonder if they mean park the heads.One of my computer dealers used to say that the sudden power outage forces a head park, too many of those and it's goodnight drive since it's not good for the heads to do that too often. That's what I was told, don't know if it's bullshit or not. The accelerometer could be performing this task, but it swings the heads pretty hard into park, as I understand.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 09, 2023, 05:50:34 am
content: Quote from: Buriedcode on January 09, 2023, 01:20:21 amThese Murata shock sensors mounted on the HDs controller board probably just temporarily park the HD head. Such an event might even be logged in the Windows Event viewer.However, the Laptops with the feature of a mems Zero G free-fall and shock detection sensor are placed on the laptop's motherboard. Some of those probably have a kill the system power function.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 09, 2023, 05:54:33 am
content: Quote from: BrianHG on January 08, 2023, 12:13:39 pmMaybe I should buy one of these sensors, mount it on a small PCB & scope it with different settings playing Janet Jackson's song...

author: AVGresponding
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 09, 2023, 06:09:20 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on January 09, 2023, 05:14:55 amFTFY...

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 09, 2023, 06:34:20 am
content: Quote from: AVGresponding on January 09, 2023, 06:09:20 amFor a HD, or anything else, sweep alone isn't enough, you need some chaotic white noise in there as well.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 09, 2023, 07:16:14 am
content: At 6:50 Dave was able to sort of reproduce the error with more detailed results with a test tone a bit later.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 09, 2023, 07:50:04 am
content: Quote from: tom66 on January 08, 2023, 11:43:02 amI'd suggest this is poor design, or something was wrong. Laptops are designed to be portable, moved, tilted, picked up or otherwise shoved about. I'd be pretty pissed if my laptop powered off every time I moved it. It would be going right back to the shop for a full refund.Hard disk interfaces (and operating systems) have for decades been designed in such a way that if there is a delay in accessing media, then the system will cope with that and simply wait.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 09, 2023, 08:18:28 am
content: Quote from: Halcyon on January 09, 2023, 07:50:04 amI completely agree. I saw a youtube video illustrating the bug on a Toshiba laptop. What was illustrated that the windows HD file access was paused a few times while playing the song. However, this just may have been just a slow laptop, or swap-file access.You do know that free-fall mems accelerometers cannot sense gravity. All they can can do is measure acceleration in 3 axis. Their measured acceleration needs to go through a complex formula to determine if there is a true drop. Calculation on the older mems units, like the .pdf I linked to, which has an illustration of the waveform as a free fall begins, continuously performs this calculation built into the mems IC and there are a set of controls to set the filter's 'window' frequency rolloff, response time and threshold sensitivity. When set high enough, looking at the waveform provided in the .pdf, it is something which can be easily tricked even with a very low volume, but particular sound which mimics that window's opening of an object beginning to accelerate exactly 9.8m/s2. All other signals are rejected by the 'free-fall' detector's formula. This means no solid tone. No impact. No closing laptop lid. No lifting up, or lowering down of the laptop. You need the effect of Earth specific gravity drop. Note that other mem accelerometers, like those from NXP, had to use a MCU to run the calculation to detect the free-fall pattern and again, there are online papers on how to do this while rejecting all other forms of acceleration.

author: mushroom
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 09, 2023, 02:10:59 pm
content: Wasn't a laptop, wasn't Janet Jackson.20 years ago, I repurposed as PC speakers a pair of small shelf speakers I built in the mid '80. Put them on the desktop. Also was sitting on the desktop an external 5.25" backup HDD. As soon as I played some music, the HDD died.Just desk resonance, and it didn't take long !Can't remember what I was testing the speaker+amp with. At this time, probably some BNWOHM or hair metal MP3 the mule brought to me...

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 09, 2023, 07:54:26 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on January 09, 2023, 05:14:55 amIf it did happen, then it would essentially be a defect with the HDD design (and testing), and it's very typical, and very "clickbaity", to carefully avoid pointing to the HDD vendor and amuse people with a funny narrative. Yeah, it's just the bassline, dudes.No wonder the topic is being relayed at an amazing speed by a ton of high-viewed Youtubers.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 09, 2023, 08:06:37 pm
content: Quote from: BrianHG on January 09, 2023, 08:18:28 amThey do not sense gravity, but they can determine it indirectly by sensing the reaction force when the device is stationary. It's actually an annoyance when you want to determine linear acceleration only with those accelerometers. A MEMS accelerometer lying flat (and still) on a table will measure ~1g along the Z axis, and close to 0 along X and Y.In pure free fall, the measured acceleration on all 3 axis will be close to 0. So you can detect free fall. To some degree.Now it's not 100% accurate, but merely taking the norm of the measured acceleration vector is usually enough to determine free fall. When the device is standing still on a surface, whatever its orientation, the norm will be close to 1g. When it's in free fall, it will be close to 0g. Of course there can be specific motions that could somewhat make this very simple approach fail, but it's usually good enough.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 09, 2023, 09:11:23 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on January 09, 2023, 07:54:26 pmActually its almost a miracle hard disks can work at all with vibrations present considering track width in nanometers.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 10, 2023, 03:31:34 pm
content: Quote from: wraper on January 09, 2023, 09:11:23 pmEven more miraculous is devices like the original iPod with 20 ~ 160GB micro hard disks inside them. These devices can play music while you are cycling and in my limited experience they never dropped out. It's almost a shame such a device lost out to flash memory, of course flash is technologically better, but it's *boring*.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 11, 2023, 05:18:54 am
content: Quote from: tom66 on January 10, 2023, 03:31:34 pmNo. Apple's big thing about the IPOD is that their playback cache was stored in ram as .mp3 and that they had an hours worth of it which was loaded in around ~5 seconds. If you stopped moving for a few seconds, the drive could power up, load the next hour of music, and go back to deep sleep saving the battery life.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 11, 2023, 09:22:51 am
content: Quote from: BrianHG on January 11, 2023, 05:18:54 amYes, I suppose that would help - but wasn't that more about power saving than anything? You'd still need to spin the disk up if you like to skip songs a lot, and it didn't seem to have trouble when I did that.

author: Haenk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 11, 2023, 11:00:20 am
content: Quote from: Ed.Kloonk on January 09, 2023, 05:43:08 amI'd say that is nonsense - if powered down, the platters still spin, so the heads are still up in the air (so to speak); the arm itself snaps back into parking position almost immediatly (*way* faster than the spindown duration) and the heads are then stabilzed by some plastic spacers and above a "crash zone" on the platters. So sudden power loss is usually no problem (other than maybe data loss due to unwritten data). The arm mechanics is really extremely solid and AFAIR there were even drives that were powered down permanently for energy savings (early WD Green?), I think those had powerup/down-cycles (which are mechanically equivalent to a power loss, minus the platter motor) in the hundreds of thousands or even millions.

author: MrMobodies
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 11, 2023, 11:08:06 am
content: I remembered seeing a few laptops in the past with a rubber patch under or near the hard disk cover with a label on it hinting to absord shocks.I wonder if that would help bit with the high pitched noise.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 11, 2023, 11:09:09 am
content: Quote from: Haenk on January 11, 2023, 11:00:20 amNot sure how mainstream it is, but some Sandisk drives use the platter as a "capacitor" to generate enough power to run the park head mechanism. The motor driver 'regens' onto the isolated 12V bus to run some of the electronics on the board, and then once the head is parked the final action is to 'brake' the platter to a stop as quickly as possible. The data in the 64MB cache (if it's partially a write-delay cache) is presumably lost, as there isn't enough time to write that out. For SSDs, it's common to see an array of capacitors on the drive which are intended to provide enough worst-case runtime to empty the DRAM caches. e.g.https://images.anandtech.com/doci/9258/IMG_2329.jpg

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 11, 2023, 11:10:14 am
content: Quote from: BrianHG on January 11, 2023, 05:18:54 amI doubt about hours, classic iPod had 32MB of RAM, later increased to 64MB in 5-6th gen. This is certainly not enough for hours of cache in acceptable quality.

author: ebastler
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 11, 2023, 01:04:24 pm
content: 20 minutes of buffering time is what they claimed (and achieved) for the early iPods.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 11, 2023, 06:32:22 pm
content: Quote from: tom66 on January 11, 2023, 11:09:09 amSanDisk doesn’t manufacture hard disks. They may at some point have sold external hard drives (though I couldn’t find any examples), but the actual hard disk drives inside would have been bought from someone else.Anyhow, it’s my understanding that hard disks do in fact use the motor as a generator to attempt to write our final data from cache when power is lost, but I can’t remember where I read that. I did find a Seagate patent describing using the motor as a generator to then copy the cache to a non-volatile cache (flash?).They definitely use the energy to park the heads, as you said.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 11, 2023, 07:02:50 pm
content: Quote from: tooki on January 11, 2023, 06:32:22 pmSorry, getting my Sandisk and Seagate mixed up - I do mean Seagate.I think the problem with flushing the DRAM is that it's likely going to be many sectors across the disk, and if it requires more than a few seeks, you'll deplete the energy in that disk pretty quickly. Also, now you need the controller itself to be running, which normally operates from a little regulator hanging off the 5V rail, and the controller needs to be able to manage with a varying disk speed rather than a fixed one, which probably creates all sorts of complications for managing the DSP stuff.Not impossible to imagine they could flush something like a bad sectors table, or flush RAM to flash. The latter would be an almost entirely deterministic operation. Maybe they could dump the DRAM linearly to the start of the disk in a reserved sector range? It'd need to recover this sector on the next power on, but might work.