plickfu

Just to correct: by your description (small size, small sound quality), sound is actually directly proportional to size, not inversely. But anyway. I recently ditched my Vaio Pocket for a 5G Ipod. I am really surprized by Ipod sound quality after what I had heard. But I have my music encoded in lossless, which is the main reason I went to Ipod anyway. Then again, I am using Sony MDR-EX71 headphones. Overall, I actually peceive the songs on my Ipod (in lossless) to sound better than the CD. Some of the EQ settings really sound great to me. But it depends what you're listening to, I suppose. Enjoy your Nano. Steve

For those of you interested in the very outstanding Sony Vaio Pocket, I have listed mine on eBay. Please follow this link to the auction: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...AMESE%3AIT&rd=1 The auction includes the VP, everything that came with it, genuine Sony case, and a good 1800 or so songs. And I ship everywhere. Please e-mail me at plickfu@hotmail.com if you have any questions. Thanks and good luck! Best regards, Steve

I found exactly the opposite. I thought the WAV to 352kbps had showed much warmer treble response. Conversely, I thought Lossless256 to 352 sounded not quite as good as Atrac3+256. This makes sense because we now know that it's the lossy 256 that gets transcoded to 352, which is pointless. In any case, I really hope that old players (i.e., Vaio Pocket) will be able to support lossless in the future. Steve P.S. I use MDR-EX71 headphones with Vaio Pocket, so they're not the best.

This thing is freakin' weird! So, I did some playing around with various bitrates and transfer settings. My subjective findings follow. First I imported a CD at 320kbps. When I transfered to my Vaio Pocket, it upconverted to 352kbps. This sounds better than 256, IMO. A bit more nuanced, richer. Then I did Atrac Lossless 256, again upconverted to 352 kbps. I'm not too hot on this one. We know for the time being that the lossless codecs are sort of useless (until that VP firmware update, right, Sony?). I like the promise of a lossless codec; let's hope Sony allow us the opportunity to use it to its potential. Then I imported in PCM, downconverted to 352kbps. This is like a long way of importing the CD initially at 352kbps. This sounds awesome! This is where Sony have been hiding all of the treble and midrange from song I imported at 256kbps! I am only going to do this for a few CDs because, to be honest, this took about 1.5 hours for 4 CDs. I don't want to waste time on converting, because as I finish me collection, my VP will support lossles (I hope!). We'll see. Summarily, I really like having an extra 100kbps, but this whole lossless thing is a mess. I can't wait until I can actually use it! Steve