Sony Puts MP3,
A Rival Format,
On a WalkmanBy PHRED DVORAK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
December 1, 2004TOKYO — Bowing to market pressures, Sony Corp. finally unveiled a hard-drive-equipped Walkman that handles the popular, but rival, music format, MP3.
The move is a hard step for Japan’s gadget king, since it puts a competing technology — MP3 — on a flagship product. Sony has a long track record of championing proprietary technology on its devices, and previous versions of that Walkman portable music player had supported only Sony’s native Atrac music format.
Sony is falling increasingly behind in the portable-music business it pioneered in 1979 with the Walkman. The move to support MP3 is a tacit acknowledgment that Sony won’t be able to catch up with the likes of Apple Computer Inc.’s iPod, which uses MP3, unless it compromises.
Until recently, most of Sony’s portable digital-music players supported only the company’s proprietary Atrac compression format, launched in the early 1990s for use with Sony’s MiniDisc, or MD, players and recorders. Sony later developed MD Walkmans that hooked up to personal computers and could pass digital music files back and forth.
But MDs, though popular in Asia, never took off in the rest of the world. Instead, the MP3 format became popular with music-download sites and a swarm of PC-linked digital-music players, most notably the iPod.
Sony’s first attempt to go head to head with the iPod, a hard-drive-equipped Walkman launched this year, has been pummeled by criticism it only played Atrac files. That meant that MP3 files had to be converted to Atrac, an acronym for adaptive transform acoustic coding, before they could be played — a clunky, time-consuming process.
A Sony spokesman said the company decided to make the new Walkman compatible with MP3 as well as Atrac because there are many people who already have MP3 music collections on their PCs.
The new Walkman will have a 20-gigabyte hard drive and go on sale this month in Japan and the United Kingdom and some time next year in the U.S., the rest of Europe and Asia. Sony said the Walkman will sell for around 42,000 yen, or $408, in Japan.
Sony also is launching in Japan a Walkman with one gigabyte of built-in flash memory that also supports MP3.
Sony has finally admitted defeat with ATRAC. With the recent announcement about HD-DVD beating out Blu-Ray for the favor of a few movie studios, it looks like Sony keeps getting spanked. They still make the best electronics IMO, but I really wonder why they can’t establish dominance on the standards they develop.