I visited Sony Japan in 1999-2000 to give them a demo of the new audio codec my company (AT&T Labs) was co-developing with Fraunhofer. We were trying to convince them to buy into our crazy plan of selling music over the Internet. (Needless to say, neither AT&T nor Sony won that battle, but AAC did.) We spent some time in a studio with some of their top studio engineers playing tracks on AAC and Sony’s proprietary ATRAC3 at different BPS, trying to decide which was better. They agreed that AAC worked better at lower encoding rates, but it didn’t move them —- they were too focused on hardware.

Fun trip though!