For Sony, the advent of MP3 must have been a particular irritation. After all, well before MP3 achieved any popularity Sony had released its own perceptual encoding/compression system for digital audio: ATRAC.

Given this history and the fact that it owns a huge recording label whose copyrights it wishes to protect, it is natural that Sony has been reluctant to provide a straight MP3 player. Its initial foray into solid state digital audio was consequently based on an enhanced form of ATRAC, called ATRAC3. In its MiniDisc guise ATRAC3 offers three compression amounts: the original 292Kb/s plus 132 and 66Kb/s. The latter two are called long play modes. But for Flash memory players, ATRAC3 dispenses with the highest bit rate and offers 132, 105 and 66Kb/s. It complicated matters by producing its own physical Flash memory format, called the Memory Stick.

Since the Memory Stick is bigger than Compact Flash, Smart Media and Multi Media Cards, the Memory Stick Walkman was hobbled a little by its excessive size (the release of a new half-sized version of the Memory Stick is imminent). The Network Walkman NW-E3 deals with this by relying solely on an inbuilt 64MB of Flash memory, of which 60.6MB is available for music. Consequently the player is tiny and weighs just 43g, complete with battery.

The first thing to look at is sound quality. After extensive testing, I can forthrightly proclaim that ATRAC3 sounds better than equivalent MP3 encoding rates. Substantially so at the lower rates. But if you have any respect for music, stick with the highest rate. The 66 and 105Kb/s rates still sound poor, just not as poor as MP3. All this, though, depends on you encoding from WAV files.

The supplied software is Sonys OpenMG Jukebox. The manual warns that the software wont work in Windows 95/NT or 2000, nor on a Windows 98 system upgraded from 3.1 or 95. This is poor software design. I should note that it locked up my main computer (which has a clean Windows 98 installation) twice before I gave up. Fortunately it worked okay on my Win98 notebook.

It also implements SDMI-compliant copyright protections. You can only download a track to three different devices, and then no more. If you upload a track from the Walkman to another computer, it is not playable.

The Network Walkmans frequency response sound is bass forward. With the highest bit rate the frequency response was flat to 20,000Hz but boosted by 5dB at 20Hz.

Undistorted output on a sine wave was limited to a mere quarter of a volt, so you need sensitive headphones if you want decent output levels. The Network Walkman is a good first go. I would just like to see an improvement in the software and a second look at the headphone amplifier.