Oasis makes noise when turning page

[NullNix]

I can confirm the noise, though only now I'm listening for it, while reading in bed with my head right up against the Oasis: you have good ears!

It comes from about halfway down the bulge on the back containing the circuitry and battery, and only happens in the period while a large screen refresh is taking place. However, now I listen for it, my PW1 makes exactly the same sort of noise, if a little lower-pitched. It's harder to hear because the backing is thicker, but if you put your ear right against the middle of the back while you turn a page, particularly if it involves a whole-screen refresh flash, the sound is quite audible if the surroundings are quiet.

The shape of the Oasis makes it clear that this noise is *not* associated with the large electric fields needed to move the ink around, because it's not coming from the screen. The PW1 lets you verify the true cause, because it's so much slower; kick up the web browser to look at a Wikipedia page, and while it sits there with an unchanging white screen thinking hard about possibly maybe at some point in the future displaying the page you asked for, you can hear it wheezing quietly in intermittent bursts at a variety of pitches. (The higher pitch of the Oasis page-turn noise is probably a side-effect of the increased resolution of the screen: whatever loop is triggering this has to spin faster to cover more pixels in the same amount of time. Plus, the CPU is clocked faster.)

This is definitely either transformer noise or some similar inductive effect causing small-scale oscillations of some component, thus sound production. It's the sound of computation! It's just more audible on the Oasis because there's so little stuff to block the sound.

So enjoy the noise! It's proof that your new electric slave is working its little inductive guts out for you. (It's probably also a way to verify that the thing hasn't crashed, but is just slow: if the noise is wavering on and off in an inconsistent fashion, it's neither hung nor in a simple infinite loop. I've used this sort of side-channel for debugging before...)

If the Voyage, PW[23], and indeed K4, K3, K2, DX and K1 don't make the same sort of noise (though at different pitches and possibly sometimes too hard to hear at all) I'll eat my own hat. Heck, the Fire probably does too but I doubt it goes to sleep for long periods the way the Kindles do, so you can't really tell the noise is there because it never stops.

[coy]

Thanks NullNix, surprisingly, the noise is not there when the Oasis is set to landscape mode. So maybe a software update can fix it in the future?

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by coy

Thanks NullNix, surprisingly, the noise is not there when the Oasis is set to landscape mode. So maybe a software update can fix it in the future?

The noise is still there, but much quieter. I have absolutely no idea why that might be!

[coy]

Less text, e.g. by setting spacing to medium or even loose, makes the noise nearly disappear.

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by coy

Less text, e.g. by setting spacing to medium or even loose, makes the noise nearly disappear.

Yeah, that's what I'd expect: there's less computation to do to figure out how to move the ink around if more of it is fixed at white between pages.

[Tzar]

This thread is one of the most bewildering thread I've read in a long time.