Hi-Capacity, Hi-Battery Life and Hi-Quality Combine to Create Ideal Digital Music Solution
LAS VEGAS (CES Booth #N109), Jan. 7, 2004 -Taking the MiniDisc? a big step forward, Sony today announced its new Hi-MD? Walkman® digital music players.
With Hi-MD technology, users can record up to 45 hours of music at up to 100 times transfer speed on one disc, while still enjoying the extensive battery life, compact design and robustness for which MD players are recognized. Removable, re-recordable Hi-MD media provides music lovers with unlimited storage capacity to build an infinite library of their favorite songs.
"Net MD Walkman recorders have been the top-selling digital music players for the past 18 months and with Hi-MD players, we're giving music lovers more choices," said Todd Schrader, vice president of marketing for Sony Electronics' portable audio products. "Nothing's been left out. We've created the best overall portable music solution that addresses digital music fans' needs for high capacity storage and long battery life in a small and extremely durable device."
Hi-MD Walkman recorders incorporate the ATRAC3plus? codec. The ATRAC3plus format is a high-quality audio compression technology that Sony developed to effectively reduce the size of audio files while preserving more of the sound quality.
With ATRAC3plus compression, more audio files can be burned to Hi-MD media or for that matter, to a standard MiniDisc. Music can be compressed to 132, 105, 66, 64 or 48 kbps (kilobits per second), so you can store more music or record at higher fidelity. By compressing at 48 kbps, users can enjoy 45 hours of music on one Hi-MD disc or 13 hours of music on one standard, 80-minute MiniDisc.
Links:
Press Release
Minidisc.org - more details about the release
Although the common opinion is that Minidisc is going the way of the dodo, this release might actually give Sony a shot at competing against the likes of the iPod mini and such. The players also feature the ability to upload recorded audio which is a boon to musicians and people like me who record med school class lectures. No more real-time upload of recordings! Woohoo! Time to finally replace my MZ-R700.
The players even support charging by USB and you can use them as file transfer devices. 1 GB blanks will only cost $7, and you can reformat old discs to the new standard or read them as is (i.e. backwards compatible). The only downside that I could see is the bloody OpenMG system that they are still using. I wonder if they will improve it with this revision.
I didn't see this in the search, so I am assuming this is NOT a repost.