I like Sony, and I commend them for promoting high quality audio. This is what I don't get though:
Since when is FLAC and ALAC higher than CD quality? No where is bit rate and sample rate mentioned. Even if that were the case, CD quality, at 16 bit and 44.1k sample rate, isn't exactly "high-res." This has been around since the 80's. They are promoting listening to a CD as "high res" now?
I see that the MP3 player supports the higher sample rates (48k and up) and the headphones support higher frequency response (20 Khz +). There's no point for this, especially for a portable player. Uncompressed 16 bit, 44.1k sample covers the full range of human hearing (20 hz - 20 khz) as well as plenty of dynamic range (96 db).
Anything beyond this is just pure excess, and cannot be discerned by the human ear. What they are doing is selling us CD quality again as if it was something special.