I bought a new HI-MD unit with native MP3 playback, i have found something strange and annoying!

When i play a 256kbps (lame - cbr) of flat repsonse white noise you get the expected drop at 19khz but a slight drop in volume in everything above 3khz.
The encoder makes no difference, wavs and atrac copies of the white noise wav do NOT display the same loss.
You can compensate by using the equalizer putting 4khz up a notch and 10khz up 2 creates an almost flat response but i wonder why this is, is Sony trying to make MP3 playback seem bad compared to Atrac or is the decoder just no good?

Yes, this has been well discussed at the MiniDisc Community; Sony is deliberately trying to make MP3 sound inferior to ATRAC3.

Sony should - for their own good - stop to cripple their hardware with all these lame limitations like Sonicstage and lacking mp3 support.... I can only hope people don't buy their players...

I decided so far ago. And not only players. I have plenty of SONY production in my home. But will never buy any SONY product due their stupid policies.

I think you gotta get your facts straight. I own a newer NW-E507 Sony player and it's a great product. I don't ever have to use SonicStage and my MP3s sound very good. I've recently posted a review of this unit on a separate thread. I could only imagine this is a Hi-MD issue.

I also own one of their flash players (1GB NW-E407), and IMO, it is one of the most compelling devices I've used in a long time. It sounds fantastic and has astounding battery life, even with MP3's (which don't have the same problem with playback as Hi-MD units do). MP3's also don't have to be transfered with SonicStage anymore. The OLED display is really neat, too

Don't be so quick to bash Sony - as much as I dislike ATRAC, MiniDiscs, and SonicStage, I really love my new player. (I probably wouldn't if I were forced to use ATRAC and SonicStage, though).