The quality of sound produced by either Apple's iPod or Sony's new Walkman are equivalent -- they both sound great (though they sound much better on higher-end, third-party headphones). But the dirty little secret these companies have harbored -- all the while persuading you to digitize your music library -- is that the songs you download from their respective online retail outfits has been compressed to 128kbps; a bit rate that allows the songs to sound good through ear bud speakers, but sounds threadbare and hollow if you play your digital music library over a home hi-fi system.
The reason for this has to do with the way music is compressed. A standard MP3 file, for example, is made smaller in part by removing sounds inaudible to the human ear. The lower the bit rate, the lower the threshold that sounds we can hear are being removed. Go lower than 128kbps and guitars have less crunch, string instruments less pluck. Pipe these tunes from your computer hard drive through an amplifier and out of high-end speakers and the music loses its ambience and immediacy, like a band playing with blankets over their heads.
Apple must have received a truck-load of letters complaining about this shortcoming (I know for certain of only one -- mine) because they've fixed it. Apple Lossless is an option that's now available to audiophiles who download music from the iTunes Music Store. It's an encoder that allows you the full quality of an uncompressed CD, but using about half the storage space. And it still costs the same US$0.99 per track.
Apple has taken a bite out of a business that once belonged only to Sony. But are they revolutionizing the way we listen to music? Not in Taiwan. Not yet anyway. Like Jobs said, though: It's starting to happen.
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