In the course of unobvious experiments, it turned out that Rhythm Nation even broke laptops nearby – the sounds of the track resonated with a hard drive.
Microsoft employee named Raymond Chen told in his blog that in the era of Windows XP, a number of laptops and mobile computers might fail due to an unusual reason – the devices broke down if someone nearby turned on the song “Rhythm Nation” by Janet Jackson.
According to Chen, at that time one of the large computers’ manufacturers suddenly discovered that part of his devices hangs or even stops working if you run certain a clip on them. It is not clear exactly how this was discovered, but further experiments showed that the video “broke” even those devices that were next to the sound source, although the video was not launched on the computer itself.
It turned out that the song was the problem: some of the sounds of “Rhythm Nation” played at certain frequencies – they resonated with computer hard drives running at 5400 rpm, and in some cases broke them. As a result, the developers had to add a special filter for the audio driver, which removed unwanted frequencies.
I am sure they marked the codec with some kind of digital sticker “not to delete”. But I’m afraid that since then everyone has already forgotten regarding his purpose. I hope that the laptops of that company no longer have this useless filter.
Reimond Chen
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