Author Topic: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops  (Read 4976 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Online BrianHGTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 8275
  • Country: ca
    • LinkedIn
This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« on: January 07, 2023, 10:09:54 am »
This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops  :-DD

(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...)


« Last Edit: January 07, 2023, 12:24:20 pm by BrianHG »
 

Offline AVGresponding

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 4931
  • Country: england
  • Exploring Rabbit Holes Since The 1970s
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #1 on: January 07, 2023, 12:10:19 pm »
I think you mean 5400rpm (90Hz)? Presumably this also means 7200rpm drives would potentially be vulnerable to 120Hz resonance...
nuqDaq yuch Dapol?
Addiction count: Agilent-AVO-BlackStar-Brymen-Chauvin Arnoux-Fluke-GenRad-Hameg-HP-Keithley-IsoTech-Mastech-Megger-Metrix-Micronta-Racal-RFL-Siglent-Solartron-Tektronix-Thurlby-Time Electronics-TTi-UniT
 
The following users thanked this post: BrianHG

Offline Halcyon

  • Global Moderator
  • *****
  • Posts: 6126
  • Country: au
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #2 on: January 07, 2023, 01:27:22 pm »
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.
« Last Edit: January 07, 2023, 01:45:53 pm by Halcyon »
 

Online BrianHGTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 8275
  • Country: ca
    • LinkedIn
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #3 on: January 07, 2023, 02:16:24 pm »
     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.
 

Offline AVGresponding

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 4931
  • Country: england
  • Exploring Rabbit Holes Since The 1970s
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #4 on: January 07, 2023, 04:13:16 pm »
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.

Presumably 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   :-//
nuqDaq yuch Dapol?
Addiction count: Agilent-AVO-BlackStar-Brymen-Chauvin Arnoux-Fluke-GenRad-Hameg-HP-Keithley-IsoTech-Mastech-Megger-Metrix-Micronta-Racal-RFL-Siglent-Solartron-Tektronix-Thurlby-Time Electronics-TTi-UniT
 

Online Benta

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 6420
  • Country: de
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #5 on: January 07, 2023, 08:43:25 pm »
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.
 

Offline Ed.Kloonk

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 4000
  • Country: au
  • Cat video aficionado
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #6 on: January 07, 2023, 08:47:49 pm »
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.
iratus parum formica
 

Online wraper

  • Supporter
  • ****
  • Posts: 17952
  • Country: lv
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #7 on: January 07, 2023, 08:49:14 pm »
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.
The 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.
 

Online wraper

  • Supporter
  • ****
  • Posts: 17952
  • Country: lv
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #8 on: January 07, 2023, 08:50:53 pm »
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.
It's a very old story and many laptops still have a HDD which usually is 5400RPM.
 
The following users thanked this post: Ed.Kloonk

Offline Ed.Kloonk

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 4000
  • Country: au
  • Cat video aficionado
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #9 on: January 07, 2023, 08:52:35 pm »
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.

Substitute Tom Cruise in Risky Business with Halcyon. Now substitute Bob Segar with Janet Jackson.

 :o
iratus parum formica
 

Online wraper

  • Supporter
  • ****
  • Posts: 17952
  • Country: lv
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #10 on: January 07, 2023, 08:59:54 pm »
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.
Well, 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.
 

Online SiliconWizard

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 15800
  • Country: fr
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #11 on: January 07, 2023, 09:01:24 pm »
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.
The 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.

Yep. 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.
 

Online Benta

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 6420
  • Country: de
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #12 on: January 07, 2023, 09:02:08 pm »
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?

 

Online wraper

  • Supporter
  • ****
  • Posts: 17952
  • Country: lv
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #13 on: January 07, 2023, 09:08:08 pm »
 

Online Benta

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 6420
  • Country: de
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #14 on: January 07, 2023, 09:45:46 pm »
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.
 

Offline eti

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • !
  • Posts: 1801
  • Country: gb
  • MOD: a.k.a Unlokia, glossywhite, iamwhoiam etc
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #15 on: January 07, 2023, 09:54:24 pm »
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!"
 

Online Benta

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 6420
  • Country: de
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #16 on: January 07, 2023, 10:11:08 pm »
You used bold, red, CAPATALIZED text for your reply... Your head will blow up in a few seconds!
 

Offline Ranayna

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 986
  • Country: de
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #17 on: January 07, 2023, 10:17:41 pm »
Way to blow this "warning" out of the water, @eti.

1. This story is old
2. Only applied to certain models of harddrives
3. Only in rare cases anything happened, even of problematic laptops
4. This was not permanent damage

As 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.
 
The following users thanked this post: tooki

Offline AndyBeez

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 858
  • Country: nu
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #18 on: January 08, 2023, 12:57:12 am »
Floppy drives take revenge...

As big brother says, Janet, Just Beat It:

 
The following users thanked this post: SeanB

Online BrianHGTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 8275
  • Country: ca
    • LinkedIn
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #19 on: January 08, 2023, 03:18:03 am »
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.
« Last Edit: January 08, 2023, 01:28:50 pm by BrianHG »
 

Online BrianHGTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 8275
  • Country: ca
    • LinkedIn
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #20 on: January 08, 2023, 03:34:11 am »
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.
 

Offline Ed.Kloonk

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 4000
  • Country: au
  • Cat video aficionado
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #21 on: January 08, 2023, 04:14:56 am »
Cool edit.  :-+

Ahead of it's time.
iratus parum formica
 
The following users thanked this post: Halcyon

Online tom66

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7336
  • Country: gb
  • Electronics Hobbyist & FPGA/Embedded Systems EE
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #22 on: January 08, 2023, 11:43:02 am »
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.

I 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?)
 

Online BrianHGTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 8275
  • Country: ca
    • LinkedIn
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #23 on: January 08, 2023, 11:49:17 am »
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.

I 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?)
Well, 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.
« Last Edit: January 08, 2023, 12:02:23 pm by BrianHG »
 
The following users thanked this post: tom66

Online BrianHGTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 8275
  • Country: ca
    • LinkedIn
Re: This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
« Reply #24 on: January 08, 2023, 12:13:39 pm »
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.pdf

Yes, 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.
« Last Edit: January 08, 2023, 12:34:10 pm by BrianHG »
 


Share me

Digg  Facebook  SlashDot  Delicious  Technorati  Twitter  Google  Yahoo
Smf