Reading from Wikipedia, I was under the impression that when storing in ATRAC lossless, you can choose the bitrate for the lossy core of the track (much like the way DTS-MA works in Blu-ray) and in Sonicstage, it says that lossy core will be used for fast transfers to Walkman devices. I'm wondering by choosing 256kbps as the lossy part of the ATRAC lossless, there would be no need for transcoding when downloading music to my Hi-MD player.