pata2001

Damage: Good to be here. I though this was MDCF, and was surprised that I had to register again. Yeah, the NE20 brings me back to AtracCD, mainly because of the seamless feature. I thought the 5x remotes are not available seperately (yet)? And a blue one some more? Where did you find it ishi? The one I believe comes in color is the 53EL included with the NE820s.

Sure, Sony has plenty of "failed" formats, but don't forget about the infamous 3.5" FDD though. We will see how non-consumer friendly these new formats will be (DRM, copy protection, etc). Another reason why plain old CD is still the format of choice for Audio. I wonder how popular DVD would have been if the CSS encryption was never cracked. For now, I would go with blu-ray, mainly because it has larger storage potential (more future proof). With PS3, Sony will basically put a BD-ROM player into many households.

Note that with MP3, it's easy to re-configure your encoder (eg. lame) to do any lowpass of your preference. You can encode a 128kbps MP3 without any lowpass, or 320kbps with 16000Hz lowpass if you want to. Ishiyoshi: It would be wonderful, and interesting, if you could do an analysis like this for the whole shebang of various Atrac bitrates.

Another addition: 1st gen players cannot play Atrac gaplessly. There is no "seamless" option, nor any menu options. This option (including the system menu for play modes and other settings) is introduced starting 2nd gen forward. Also, some NE-3xx models do have remote port. The car-kit edition(NE326CK) does have a remote port for the included remote commander. However, the LCD on the remote displays nothing. NE-320 psyc editions also come with non-LCD remote, presumingly they won't display anything either with LCD remotes.