We should have guessed that Apple wasn't just going to smile politely through pursed lips on this one-- not with so much at stake. Remember last week when Sony introduced its idea of an "iPod-killer," the NW-HD1 Network Walkman? While there are at least as many reasons why it can't touch the iPod (ATRAC3, ATRAC3, and ATRAC3, among others) as reasons why Apple should worry (weight and battery life, anyone?), there's one alleged feature that probably had Sony taking a very, very long shower adding it to the marketing copy-- namely, the claim that the NW-HD1 holds 13,000 songs. It does, but only if said songs sound like crap. Basically, Sony's trying to hoodwink Joe Shmoe-- who presumably thinks a "bit rate" is something to do with the RPMs on his power drill-- by publishing a song capacity based on music encoded at 48 kbps, which no one would ever do under any circumstances ever ever ever.

So yes, Sony admits it's taking on the iPod with the NW-HD1, and its marketing spiel indeed claims that its player holds 13,000 songs compared to the iPod's 5,000-- despite the fact that the two players have the exact same capacity hard drives. And since Apple is really getting to like being the top dog in a given market for once, it's not planning to let these lies go unchallenged; the company issued a statement to the press (including the Wall Street Journal) noting that if the NW-HD1 carried music encoded at a bit rate that actual human beings would use and that wouldn't lead to listener sterility and blindness, it would only hold about 5,000 songs-- just like the 20 GB iPod. The disks are identical, so it's all down to simple math: same hard drive size + same music quality = same number of songs.

Of course, Apple couldn't resist taking a (rightly deserved) condescending little dig at the consumer electronics giant: "We're disappointed that Sony, which is new to this market, has decided to make their first impression by attempting to mislead the press and customers." Oooooo, burn.

But my oh my ain't this six minutes past rich: rather than go all sheepish like any self-respecting liar should when caught, "Sony reacted angrily to Apple's statement," and wait'll you hear why. It seems that Todd Schrader, Sony's veep of portable audio products, indignantly maintains that the "Walkman has always been about choice" and that "consumers can play songs on the Walkman in a variety of bit rates and that it is up to customers to decide the rate." Well, duh, Todd, but unfortunately Apple is complaining about your advertising, not your device's support of different bit rates. The problem is that Sony is falsely claiming that its new player, which has exactly the same storage capacity as Apple's mid-range iPod, holds 13,000 songs while the iPod only holds 5,000, which is, of course, patently false, intentionally misleading, and possibly outright criminal. Because guess what? iTunes will encode at 48 Kbps, too, if you tell it to-- and while Sony admits that 48 Kbps is its minimum, iTunes will go all the way down to 16 Kbps. Maybe Apple should simply start advertising its 20 GB iPod as holding "39,000 songs-- 3x the capacity of the Network Walkman!!" and see what Todd thinks about that.

Meanwhile, Angry Todd might also do well to refrain from tossing around sound bites about how the Walkman is "all about choice" when its customers can't encode or play songs at bit rates lower than 48 Kbps, higher than 256 Kbps (iTunes does 320 Kbps), or in any format other than Sony's own proprietary ATRAC3, which, as we recently mentioned, finished way behind pretty much everything else out there in a public listening test comparing the sound quality of different digital music formats. The iTunes-iPod tag team, meanwhile, supports AAC, MP3, WAV, uncompressed AIFF, and the new Apple Lossless format. Man, whoever thought Apple would wind up being the company that's "all about choice"?