General > General Technical Chat
This Janet Jackson BASSLINE breaks laptops
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eti:
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!"
Benta:
You used bold, red, CAPATALIZED text for your reply... Your head will blow up in a few seconds!
Ranayna:
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.
AndyBeez:
Floppy drives take revenge...

As big brother says, Janet, Just Beat It:

BrianHG:
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.
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