"martin" wrote ...
I recently bought a Sony NWS706 MP3 player and have been transferring
a few of my CD's to it via its own SonicStage software (I should
mention here that I'm a complete beginner when it comes to MP3 and the
like).

I used ATRAC 64kbps at first, because my player only has 4Gbytes of
memory, and I've lots of long works, like symphonies.

The quality seems fine, but according to so many people I've read on
the Internet, 64kbps is such a low sampling rate, quality *should* be
pretty bad.

Today I transferred a few short works using both ATRAC 64kbps and
ATRAC Lossless, and have been trying to hear the difference between
the two. I can't say I can detect any, but the few seconds needed to
switch between them makes comparison difficult. Also, I'm wondering if
I'd suddenly notice a difference should I happen to buy a better pair
of headphones in the future.

The convenience of having a lot of music on my player, and not having
to fiddle about transferring stuff as I need it, is very attractive,
but I want good quality as well.

With this in mind, I'd like to hear people's opinions on these two
formats - is the quality of ATRAC Lossless worth the extra space?

Assuming you know that ATRAC has nothing to do with MP3.

ATRAC is Sony's *proprietary* music compression scheme.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrac

It likely has a miniscule market share compared to MP3
(and the Apple-proprietary schemes, etc.) For that reason,
it is possible that few/none of the people who regularly read
these newsgroups has as much experience with current
ATRAC performance as you. You may want to try asking
your question in an MD-specific discussion forum where
ATRAC is more well-known.

Of course, the basic answer to your question (regardless
of which compression scheme) is to use the rate that best
accomplishes your personal tradeoff between size and
quality. If *YOU* can't hear the difference, save space on
your limited media. What difference does it make what
OTHER people hear? Of course, if you were encoding
audio for distribution to others, the decision factors would
potentially be different.

Sony appears to have announced that they concede defeat
in the ATRAC vs. MP3 wars....
"Sony ditching proprietary audio format...."
http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci...nclick_check=1

[ news:rec.audio.opinion deleted as useless for serious
discussion, IMHO ]