Yahoo! News - Apple hits back at Sony's 'misleading' Walkman marketing

I thought this was rather interesting. I hadn't been paying any attention to Sony's player (after all, I am an iPod owner, and the one I have now is my second iPod). When I read the first few lines of this story, I was full of ridicule for Sony's tactic...

To put it simply, Sony has stated their new 20 GB "MP3" Player (MP3 is in quotes, because this is not the format used on the player, but puts the concept into perspective) is capable of holding 13,000 songs. This, they say, beats the iPod, which currently advertisers holding up to 10,000 songs (on Apple's 40GB iPod). This would set their 20 GB player at holding 5,000 songs. So basically Sony is saying their 13,000 song player trumps Apple's 10,000 song iPod...

To clarify how encoding works, I will use a reference many are familiar with. If you recall recording TV shows using a VCR, you probably remember that there are usually 3 settings of recording quality. The high quality gives better picture & sound, however it only allows a total of 2 hours per video tape. The low quality setting allows 6 hours to be recorded on the tape, however the picture is blurry and the sound is staticy. The same type of thing happens with MP3... At high quality the music is much clearer, but the file itself is much larger. At a lower setting the file is smaller, but the song sounds worse. So if you encode an MP3 at a high rate, say 340Kbps, the MP3 file's size would be at around 7MB. Take that same song and encode it at around 128Kbps, and the MP3 is now only 4MB in size, but the sound quality isn't as good. So basically there is a trade off between file size and sound quality...

So, what's happening is this: Apple says their 40GB iPod will hold 10,000 songs. This is assuming all the songs are encoded with AAC (a format like MP3) at 128Kbps. This rate is a good trade off between size & quality. All my songs are encoded at this level, and they all sound fine to me. This is also the rate that all the songs on the iTunes Music Store are encoded at.

Sony, on the other hand, is measuring the size of their player using their proprietary encodes of ATRAC3 (another format similar to MP3) of a rate of 48Kbps. In this manner the songs are much smaller, however, the sound quality is terrible!!! There is probably nobody who uses Sony's player and encodes at this level... This level is the lowest possible setting, and is around 1/3 the default setting Sony uses!!! Using the same tactic, you could argue the 40GB iPod holds around 80,000 songs!!! This would be done by setting iTunes to encode at Apple's lowest possible setting of 16Kbps. The end result, however, would sound worse than music on an AM radio!!!

I can't believe Sony is doing this... Next they're going to say the player last 5 times longer than the iPod on a single battery charge, if you keep the volume completely off!!!