Despite the very strong perception several months ago that Sony was aiming to pull out of portable media devices, and most notably the minidisc format, it now seems to be becoming clear that the electronics giant is actually trying to nibble away at Apple's dominance of the portable media domain that it once considered its own.
One of Sony's first moves was to emphasise the vastly superior battery life of its Walkman units over the iPod. Then it wrong-footed the audio world when, to the surprise of all observers, it suddenly issued some new MD hardware: a recordable HiMD minidisc unit designed especially for recording live music, the RH1. This player broke Sony's own rules of the past in that it allowed recordings made on it to be freely transferred in the digital domain to the PC. The machine even recorded in LPCM to the HiMD disc format: that is, without any compression of the recorded audio. Since then, successive versions of the proprietary connectivity software SonicStage have allowed the transfer of other legacy recordings, hitherto protected by the DRM serial copy management sytem (SCMS), from MD back to PC.
Now in its latest issue of SonicStage, version 4.2, Sony has introduced yet another new enhancement: the ability to boost the lower bitrate modes of the codecs it currently handles (ATRAC3, ATRAC3plus, MP3, WMA, LC-AAC and the new HE-AAC). Called 'DSEE' (Digital Sound Enhancement Engine), its purpose is to 'add back' during playback, the frequencies that were lost during the compression process. Although the details are fairly sparse at the moment, this enhancement is clearly not a variation of the improved compression algorithms such as MP3pro, but more about recreating the higher-order frequencies that influence the overall audio quality. Such techniques are said to be employed by Panasonic in their Multi-remaster technology, with the crucial advantage of both technologies being that existing recordings receive the enhancement effect.
Interesting though it may seem, in SonicStage these acoustic enhancements are only for music being played back on the computer, and in the current incarnation will have no effect on music recorded to the portable device HDD, CD or MD. Preliminary and subjective tests conducted by members on the Minidisc Community Forums show that the greatest improvements are shown on the sub-100kbps encodings of WMA and MP3.
Whether this new enhancement technology is in an experimental stage only, and will eventually work its way through to the portable players that Sony produces, is anyone's guess. However it is a little more evidence that Sony has not given up the fight yet, and still has considerable desire to regain some of the audio ground that it lost to Apple in the last few years.
