I’m about to flex my credit card and get a Tascam Studio Bridge, but I need an SD card for it. I already have a couple of cards lying around, but I’m not sure if they’ll be up to the job. The price of SD cards seems to vary a lot now, so what should I be buying to get the best performance without wasting money? The manual does give some information, but I’m finding the choice and price differences a bit overwhelming!
Simon Walker
SOS Reviews Editor Matt Houghton replies:Tascam specify “SD cards that are Class 10 or higher and compatible with SD, SDHC or SDXC standards”. SD is the oldest type, and can store up to 2GB — not a lot, when you’re recording 24‑track audio. SDHC came next (in 2006), and its last two letters stand for High Capacity, denoting that this format was capable of storing up to 32GB. Finally SDXC (Extended Capacity) cards could give us 64GB to 1TB of storage (the Tascam can support only up to 512GB at the time of writing).
In my review tests of the Studio Bridge (SOS January 2025), even an SDHC card I bought about 15 years ago let me record 24 channels at 16‑bit/44.1kHz. An only slightly more recent card worked flawlessly for me at all word lengths and sample rates. So, if you have a card or two lying around already, one of them is likely sufficient to test your new toy. But I’d probably still buy a dedicated card, not least because if it lives in the Studio Bridge rather than being shared with other devices, you’ll never wonder where it is!
An SDXC type makes sense, as 128GB or 256GB cards aren’t that expensive. Class 10 was introduced in 2009, and most cards will now meet that criterion. Each card displays other information on the front, notably the maximum achievable read speed. That might be great for marketing, but we’re interested in the sustained write speed, and even if that’s not printed on the card, there will be clues.
High‑capacity V60s and V90s are where things start to get really expensive, but they’re overkill for this application.
First, there’s a number sitting inside a ‘U’ icon. With modern cards, this will likely be a 1 or 3, and the U1/U3 designation tells you that the card has either a UHS‑I or UHS‑II bus. This means write speeds of up to 104 and 312 MB/s, respectively. But we’re interested in the minimum write speed. A V rating (V30, V60 or V90) denotes the speed, and any with one of those ratings will do the job. High‑capacity V60s and V90s are where things start to get really expensive, but they’re overkill for this application. An SDXC card with a V30 write speed rating will be ample — for instance, I’m currently using a couple of 128GB Lexar Silver Plus V30 cards (about £22 $23 each) for my Studio Bridge and they seem to work very well.